Watch Me Take The Bar
Watch Me Take The Bar
This blog, originally started as a chronicle of my taking the bar, is now a look into the mind of an attorney in solo practice in Port Clinton, Ohio.
Sunday, November 06, 2005

The Post About The MBE...or...Watch Me Take The Bar (Again?)

I've been meaning to write this since I got my actual, score-type results last Saturday, and have been meaning to talk about the MBE.

I think those who took the bar in July, 2005, will always be looked upon with some sort of awe and spoken in in some hushed tones. "Oh, yes. They took the MBE of...[dramatic pause] July, 2005."

You see, EVERYONE agrees it was one of three things:

  • a fluke (highly unlikely, since the NCBE seems to be bent on not permitting flukes.)
  • some disgruntled testwriter giving the middle finger to every single examinee right up a very unhappy part of one's body (wait, I think that's every single MBE)
  • the NCBE laughing derisively at the fools who spent hundreds of dollars to spend six days listening to Feinberg/PMBR.
I tend to believe it was a combination of the second and the third.

Anywho, because we were all wandering around going, "WTF was that?" after the MBE, everyone figured the scale would be HUGE. So, when I got my results, I found that my raw score was 140, and my scaled score was...147.

7 points? That was it? Isn't it usually something like 15 points?

Now, I may be showing my ignorance here. The scaling is a mystery to me, much on the order of how 60,000,000 Americans could vote for George W. Bush. Hell, I haven't been able to get my score to add up correctly.

Is it because I had a fairly decent raw MBE score? Or did everyone get seven? Just everyone in Ohio?

How does this all work?

But here's the other thing. In Michigan, if you get a scaled score of 150 or better on the MBE, they basically read your essays to make sure you wrote something down related to the law, and not just "purple monkey dishwasher." So, if I could get, say, three more questions right (and I know where I could improve), I'd be licensed in Michigan.

Which, since I want to do work on high-conflict divorces especially involving custody, could be very valuable. When kids cross state lines, life gets even more difficult, and people are often told they have to hire a lawyer in each state.

Hmmmm...

But, seriously, does anyone else have any thoughts on the MBE scaling thing?




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