Read the whole article at MinnLawyer.com…

Bad economy can make taking the bar exam even more stressful
by Michelle Lore

The lack of sleep, quick meals, missed social events and late-night studying will soon be over. This week more than 830 would-be lawyers will flock to the RiverCentre in St. Paul for two days to sit for the Minnesota bar examination.

Test takers say that preparing for the exam has been stressful, in part because of the vast amount of information they must digest and to a lesser extent, the uncertain economic times. But for most, thoughts of anything but the exam have been put aside for the past eight weeks.

“All of the issues with the economy and employment have to be put in the back of my mind and all of my focus has to be on the law that I need to know for the bar,” said University of St. Thomas School of Law grad Rasheen Tillman, who has not yet found employment. “If in the end I don’t pass the bar I wouldn’t have a job anyway, so it all comes down to passing.”

Scott Swanson, director of academic achievement at the University of St. Thomas Law School, runs a dedicated bar review course that meets twice a week in the two months leading up to the exam. He said that despite the downturn in the economy, he doesn’t think that the stress level of test takers is higher than usual.

“Bar exam stress is its own separate thing,” he said.

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Living the law

Whatever study methods the law grads employ, it’s a stressful time for them.

“Everything in my life came to a halt,” said Tillman. “I live, breath, and sleep the law. I am trying not to burn out, but it is tiring studying day after day for such long hours.”

While the stress is real for all test takers, those law grads who don’t have a job lined up may feel it more keenly.

“There’s this fear that you really do have to pass it or people aren’t going to hire you,” Swann explained.

Read this interesting editorial in The Los Angeles Times…

Affirmative action and the bar exam
A California professor studying affirmative action should have access to law school performance statistics.

Americans have been debating the fairness and efficacy of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions for more than 30 years. Now a UCLA professor is seeking to test his hypothesis that affirmative action programs actually hurt the career prospects of minority law school graduates. But he has been hampered in his research by the indefensible failure of the State Bar of California to provide the statistics he needs.

The professor, Richard H. Sander, has requested data about the performance of white and minority law school graduates on the bar examination, along with information about the schools they attended and their grades. In resisting his request, bar officials cite the need to protect the privacy of test takers and to honor an agreement that test material will remain confidential. At the same time, some defenders of affirmative action have argued against releasing the data because they think Sander’s project could have only one purpose: to discredit the idea of racial preferences.

The privacy and legal arguments strike us as spurious, a view shared by the executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, which has joined Sander and his colleagues in asking the state Supreme Court to order the release of the information. Sander has promised that no individual student would be identified by the statistics, which would break down performance by law school.

It’s also unfair to accuse Sander of seeking to dismantle racial preferences. True, his hypothesis is that affirmative action students are disserved because they derive less benefit from an elite law school than students who meet the usual admission standards. This is the “mismatch” theory, which suggests that students who are weaker than their classmates will often do better academically — and on the bar exam — if they attend a less-competitive school.

The mismatch theory may be mistaken. But suppose it were found to be valid? That wouldn’t necessarily lead to the abolition of racial preferences. Another result might be the strengthening of mentorship and other programs to help less-well-prepared students achieve at higher levels.

An additional objection to Sander’s project is that good marks on the bar exam don’t guarantee success in the practice of law. Perhaps so. If the exam does a poor job of measuring the credentials of lawyers, it ought to be revised. But that has no bearing on Sander’s request.

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Regardless of what we think of Sander’s hypothesis, he should be given the data he seeks. Defenders of affirmative action should not fear a serious examination of how well it’s working.