Test takers

The California State Bar “inadvertently” revealed to law school deans the essay topics that will be covered on this week's bar exam, the bar told registered test-takers in an email Saturday night.

The bar said “out of abundance of caution and fairness” it has provided the same information about the test to those registered to take it on Tuesday and Wednesday at sites around the state. The topics that will be covered on the exam will be civil procedure, remedies/constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, professional responsibility, contracts and evidence.

In a statement issued Sunday, Donna Hershkowitz, the bar's chief of programs, said the disclosure was part of a “routine invitation to observe a grading session—the invitation typically goes out after the completion of the exam.” The bar has no evidence the information was shared with students, she said.

The bar did not respond to questions about which deans received the invitation or why the essay topics were included in the email to law school leaders.

The apparently errant disclosure is the latest blow for California's bar exam, which has been criticized by law school deans and others for its low pass rate and second-highest-in-the-nation passing score requirement.

Derek Mueller, a Pepperdine University School of Law professor who covers bar admissions and the test at his blog Excess of Democracy, questioned whether the release will help anyone's chances of passing the exam. Bar examiners scale, or link, the scores to the multiple choice portion of the test to the essay, he wrote in a post on Sunday. The bar's mistake “should have little, if any, impact” on any single test-taker's likelihood of passing the exam, he said.

“What it means very roughly is this: There is an opportunity to account for the difficulty or ease of the test itself and for the higher or lower quality of test-takers by looking at how those test-takers have done compared to other test-takers on previous administrations of the exam,” Mueller said.

Still, the reveal of essay topics does give test-takers two advantages, Mueller said. They'll know right away that the first question is about civil procedure and “can start from word go addressing Civil Procedure and only Civil Procedure.”

“The second advantage is that students can stop studying other, irrelevant topics like Wills & Trusts and focus exclusively on these areas,” Mueller wrote. “Again, it should have the same effect: Everyone studies the same set of topics, everyone knows them a bit better, everyone scores a bit better.”

The bar's announcement led some scheduled test-takers to question whether the email was a hoax or the result of a hack to the agency's account. The bar issued a second statement via Twitter late Saturday night confirming that the announcement was accurate. “This account has not been hacked,” the tweet said.

 

The bar's letter to law deans is posted below:

 

Read more:

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See Who Passed California's February 2019 Bar Exam

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