Failed February 2020 Bar - Now what? Forum

[LawInKansas]

I just found out that I failed the Missouri bar exam by one (1) point. Now, I am freaking out because I don't know when/if there will be a July bar exam and it looks like any one who failed the February bar is SOL on getting to use the proposed graduation privilege that is being pushed.

Any suggestions on what to do?

Also, the overall pass fail rate for my jurisdiction (MO) was MUCH lower this February. Overall pass/fail rate was 48%/52% I Know that a lot of people are worried about the integrity of the scores if a July bar exam were to happen (hence the push for graduation privilege) but what about the scores being graded for the February bar in the midst of all this chaos? From what I can see, for my jurisdiction, we saw a huge drop. My law school itself normally preforms well (90+% pass rate as of late) and we passed <20% for Missouri. Something seems wrong about that, and I am at a loss.

Are states really going to hang February bar take failures out to dry while allowing graduation privilege for the untested? It seems so messed up to me.

I am open to thoughts/ discussions on this because I am having a hard time wrapping my head around all of this.

[JoeSeperac]

I’m sorry to hear that you failed. The F20 national MBE mean of 132.5 was the lowest MBE mean in the history of the exam (going back almost 50 years to 1972). The pass rates that have been trickling in from releasing states have been shockingly low. For example, Indiana had what is likely the lowest pass rate in its history (from 1995-2016, the Feb pass rate average was 69% versus 46% for F20). For Missouri, the Feb pass rate average (from 1998-2018) was 74% versus 50% for F20. This is simply baffling to me – it seems so contradictory that the bar examiners will need to fill the ranks while at the same time having such low pass rates.

I can give you a free analysis of your scores if you submit your information here:
https://seperac.com/scoreform.php

This report is really comprehensive and it will tell you exactly where you went wrong. If you are curious, here is a sample of the report: https://www.seperac.com/bar/pdf/Seperac ... BE-J18.pdf

If you only received your MBE subscores, I can email you a breakdown of those scores if you complete this form:
http://seperac.com/subscoreform.php

You should find the reports/breakdowns helpful. Please note that if you send me your info, it will be a few weeks before I get back to you because I have to collect enough scores to figure out the F20 scale and then make the report. I then use those scales to make bar calculators that you can test here: https://mberules.com/bar-exam-calculators/

While it's little consolation, on April 3, 2020, the New York State Bar Association Task Force announced among other things that it wanted to conduct an independent psychometric analysis of the grading and scaling of the UBE. see https://nysba.org/state-bar-task-force- ... -york-law/

[SilvermanBarPrep]

I had a feeling about those numbers, Joe. But it's interesting to see that confirmed. The lowest. Yikes!

Sean