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A New York State Bar Association group is recommending ditching part of the New York bar exam to better prepare students to practice in the state.

The group, the Task Force on the New York Bar Exam, on Friday called for eliminating the New York Law Exam (NYLE) phase of the bar exam and "replacing it with a more rigorous component focused on New York law that would be a prerequisite for admission to practice in New York," according to an announcement and report from the state bar Friday.

"Our task force concluded that the current bar examination format fails to protect New Yorkers by not demanding that attorneys who seek to practice here demonstrate minimum competence in New York law," said task force chair Alan Scheinkman, presiding justice of the Appellate Division for the Second Department, in a statement.

The task force was formed in April 2019, responding to anecdotal evidence that new lawyers don't understand the rules for practicing in New York courts.

The group's recommendations a year later coincide with the coronavirus pandemic and the high uncertainty already facing law school students and graduates. But Scheinkman said the recommendations—if approved by the Court of Appeals—would not apply to current law school students and a transition time would be implemented.

On Tuesday, the New York Court of Appeals said, due to the coronavirus pandemic, it will seek to have the July bar exam rescheduled for "early September"—a plan now getting pushback from law school deans in the state. The court also said that it had authorized Chief Judge Janet DiFiore to explore the possibility of permitting law graduates waiting to take the bar exam or waiting for test results to practice under the supervision of licensed attorneys.

The task force's report on scraping part of the New York bar exam will be presented to the state bar's House of Delegates on Saturday.

In the report released Friday, the task force said its members found "overwhelming evidence that applicants to the New York bar do not take the NYLE seriously, with some students describing it as a joke."

Among its recommendations, the state bar's task force called for allowing those who do not wish to practice law in New York to take only the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) and allowing those who only wish to practice in New York to take only the Multistate Bar Examination section of the UBE and a rigorous New York test. Under the task force's proposals, law school graduates who want to practice in New York would not take the Multistate Essay Examination, Scheinkman said.

The task force further proposed a New York law certification program that would allow people to forgo the bar exam entirely. Under this program, ABA-accredited law schools inside and outside of New York would offer courses that include New York law-based content, the task force said.

Also recommended: conducting "an independent psychometric analysis" of the grading and scaling of the UBE. "The grading and scoring practices are questionable and no independent analysis has been conducted into whether the UBE accurately measures what it purports to assess," the report said.

Finally, the state bar's report proposed a learning pilot program that would allow second- and third-year law students to spend time counseling clients, working with practicing attorneys and learning other practical skills so that a portfolio of work is created and assessed every semester.

Amid the pandemic, the New York admissions process, like many other proceedings in the courts, has been put on hold. But a Wednesday statement from the four presiding justices of the Appellate Division said they are exploring opportunities to move forward.

"We are presently working on methods by which our admissions employees could do much of their work from their homes," the presiding justices said. "We are also exploring innovative methods by which the admissions process may be expedited through the use of technology. We hope to be able to implement these new approaches in the coming weeks."