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Which do you feel is harder/more important overall?

Strange question. Trust me, though, the bar exam is far harder.

Well, you do poorly on the LSAT, get into a bad law school, TLSers say you're stupid, you potentially waste thousands of dollars.

Fail the bar. Take it again. Repeat 3 times, give up, and they make you mayor of Los Angeles.

This makes no sense. Unless you scored a 180, then the LSAT is harder. The bar however is far more important, because if you don't pass you (almost, there is always business) wasted all your time and money.

from good ole' Wiki! - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_ ... ted_States

Admission without law school

In California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, an applicant who has not attended law school may take the bar exam after study under a judge or practicing attorney for an extended period of time.[5] This method is known as "reading law" or "reading the law".

New York requires that applicants who are reading the law must have at least one year of law school study (Rule 520.4 for the Admission of Attorneys).

Maine allows students with two years of law school to serve an apprenticeship in lieu of completing their third year.

LSAT is more important. the level at you perform matters and affects the trajectory of your career

Bar is harder. you simply need to pass anything more is a waste.

It's totally apples to oranges.

The bar may be "harder" the sense that it requires more preparation, but the vast majority of law students who take it seriously pass.

If you consider "passing" the LSAT to be a score that will get you into an ABA school (call it 150), then the LSAT has a 50% fail rate. With the exception of California, most bar exams have a 10-15% failure rate.

PrincetonLaw wrote:LSAT is more important. the level at you perform matters and affects the trajectory of your career

Bar is harder. you simply need to pass anything more is a waste.

You are not smart. If you don't pass the Bar you cannot practice, thus affecting your career significantly (even more so then say going to a T2 instead of a T1). Also, the Bar being pass fail is exactly what makes it easier. The vast majority of people pass the bar, whereas there is no standard on the LSAT except 180, which is pretty f'ing hard.

There seems to be an awful lot of certainty here about just how hard the bar exam is. Maybe 0Ls are now taking practice MBEs in addition to reading supplements before starting law school.

The problem with this question is that harder is not qualified. If by more important on an absolute scale (0-1 as opposed to 0-100), then that is the bar, without a doubt. If you absolutely bomb the LSAT you can still get into a law school (I think, assuming softs/UGPA). If you fail the bar, you cannot be a lawyer. The caveat is that if you do not have a JD-requiring job lined up, then passage of the bar is moot. So if you have a JD-job lined up, then the bar is more important. If you do not, then neither has any importance.

If it is harder by some other measure then the answer is it depends.

Maybe a more apt question would have been which test was a worse process from studying to receiving notification of results.

On another note, there are people here on TLS who do LSAT's for fun and look forward to the new releases of tests so they can take them. I have never heard of someone retaking the bar for fun.

the lsat is def more important since it has such a tremendous influence on where you will attend law school, which in turn has a tremendous influence on where you practice, what job you get, and the education you receive.

The bar is important but as long as you pass youre good.

granted, their both extremely important since by doing poor on either one of them you set yourself up for either attending a bad school and no practicing law period. But assuming you pass the bar, the lsat is more important. Would you rather score in 99 percentile on the bar and the 90th on the lsat, or the other way around?


once again, without doing well bar (not passing) your lsat loses a lot of meaning, and without doing well on the lsat (assuming it keeps you from going to a good school) your bar loses a lot of meaning as well (since passing the bar with a shitty law degree may not be very valuable.)

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