You’ll spend about two months taking dozens of practice essays and spending a good two or three days on the bar exam. That’s a lot of time to spend on the exam, and how much time do you think the graders will spend reading your essays? Three to five minutes per essay, maximum.

At least once before the exam, it is a good idea to try the exercise of putting yourself in the shoes of the person who will carry your destiny:

1) Set the timer for five minutes

2) Click here to go to a sample essay answer on the calbar website

3) Read a real essay exam answer

4) Come back when you’re done

Look, it doesn’t really take that long to read an answer. Please note that the exam answer you just read is a ‘model approval’ answer, and believe me when I say this, it is an incredibly well written answer! You don’t need to be even close to writing like that to pass. But hopefully you’ll see how CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT it is that your essays are structured, organized, readable, and use headings (that topic is for a different post, coming soon). For a grader to finish their essay in this short amount of time, it will need to be highly readable.

Now, if you really want to feel like a bar exam grader, repeat the exercise dozens of times at 10:00 p.m. You’ll be in a very similar situation to what the grader has to do, after spending a full day at work. , coming home to his family and now trying to meet his reading deadline of 100 bar exam essays this week. You don’t have much time and you need to be very efficient and methodical in your reading. The easier you make it for him, the better.

Bar Exam Scoring Process

Here’s a rough review of the process graders go through when grading your exam.

Bar exam raters are attorneys who have passed the bar exam and signed up to be raters. They are paid a stipend (which is probably much less than what they earn at their jobs).

After taking the bar exam, a group of graders get together and take the same essay you just took. They write a complete essay, including all the rules and analysis. The raters then get together, look at what each of them wrote, and create a ‘model’ answer.

The graders then meet with the student’s responses, and each grades the same student’s response, giving feedback on what the response should receive. They will then compare their opinions, discuss the reasons, and after several iterations, give a score for how many breakdown points each problem is worth and a score for what they think the quiz answer would be worth.

They then score a second essay, running it through the same scoring process and model they had created for the first essay, recalibrating any necessary point adjustments. Eventually, they find a response model and grading system that all raters can use. Although grading may seem subjective to each rater, believe it or not, if fifteen raters score the same exam using this calibrated point system, each rater will generally be within five points of each other. This is to ensure fairness, equality, and to remove personal subjectivity between anyone scoring the exams. Any rater whose scores are consistently five points above all other raters is generally eliminated.

In California, if your total score for the achievement test, essays, and MBE is over 1440, you pass! If your score is below 1390, you do not pass. If you fall between these two numbers, your quiz is re-scored by a different set of scorers. Hopefully you are awarded more points as you will still need to hit the 1440 mark to pass. For more information on the calibration process and the reclassification system, click here.

I hope this comforts you a bit and gives you an idea of ​​what your exam will go through after you finish uploading or turning it in on exam day.

Good luck passing your bar exam!

“This name appears in the pass list”