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 Jonathan Corbett, Civil Rights Attorney

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PSA: Don’t Take The Bar Exam Without Typing Skills

I get a lot of e-mails from law students prepping for, or wondering why they failed, the bar exam. Bar prep isn’t exactly a service I advertise, but I’m always happy to see law students thrive, so if you ask nicely I’ll spend a few minutes looking at your essays and score report and give you some thoughts.

One issue that many students might not be aware of is that a fairly solid ability to type is required if you want to pass the bar exam. You have about 40 minutes to type each essay response. The average “selected answer” published by the California bar (sample high-scoring essay response) is 1,600 – 2,000 words. That means if you are able to type non-stop at fewer than 40 words per minute, you are unable to produce a high-scoring response even if you are a bad-ass with legal rules and essay composition skills.

Take a typing test. If you’re scoring anything less than 75 WPM, you could use some practice. If you’re scoring less than 50 WPM, you would be foolish to attempt the bar exam without practice. There are tons of free or low-cost typing tutor apps that you can find with your favorite search engine, and 20 minutes a day for a few months will absolutely boost your score. Another reality check is if you’re practicing by taking previous exam questions in a timed setting and your responses are under 1,200 words, your essays aren’t long enough and if you feel like your fingers were moving the whole time, your typing may be the problem. (And, if you’re not taking previous exam questions in a timed setting in preparation for the Bar, just send me your $800 exam fee and I’ll tell you you’ve failed right away so you don’t even have to sit for the exam!)

Whether you’re just starting law school or you’re a practicing attorney, this is a skill you need ASAP.

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“The name above appears on the pass list for the February 2019 California Bar Examination.”

Jon Passes California Bar Exam

🙂

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Jon Completes Law School: A Review of Four Years at NWCU Law

Graduation CapOn Thursday, I took my final exams for my final year of school at Northwestern California University School of Law. Assuming I passed my exams, I now have a law degree making me eligible to take the February 2019 California Bar Examination, which I shall do.

If you’ve been following, you know NWCU is a distance learning school. They combine reading assignments, live online classes, recorded coursework, and a message board to accomplish a legal education. The American Bar Association categorically refuses to accredit law schools that offer distance learning, so graduates are left to take the bar exams of states that do not require the ABA’s blessing. That said, four years at NWCU cost me about a tenth of a traditional law school (~$15,000 — total, not per year), and I was able to do it without giving up the day job.

The graduation rate at NWCU seems to be in the range of 15%, based on a count of students in each year, so it shouldn’t be thought that this law degree is easy. It also requires passing California’s First-Year Law Students’ Examination after the first year, which is probably the biggest driver behind the low graduation rate given that the pass rate for that exam hovers around 20%.

I posted a review of my experience at around the 2 month point and the 2 year point. I still think those are fairly reflective of my experience: you must be self-motivated, have 2 hours per day, every day for 4 years, pay attention to deadlines, and know that if you don’t, no one’s going to remind you until it’s too late. It would probably be in eveyone’s interest if the school did more to keep people on track, but then again, you’re an adult in law school, and as a lawyer, no one is going to hold your hand to make sure you file that brief on time. I do also wish NWCU would update some of their materials that have obviously aged quite a bit, but then again, for most areas of the law, the curriculum hasn’t changed that much.

I look forward to beginning my bar prep shortly. I feel well-prepared and appreciate that I was able to learn the law with minimal disruption to my life. Three months until the exam…

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Is Pushing Someone on Train Tracks “Attempted Murder?”

I have to admit: when real life presents hypotheticals that are academically interesting for lawyers, I get a little bit excited.  Last year, a man named Kimani Stephenson made one for the law books when he pushed a woman onto New York City subway tracks.  The victim described it as follows:

“This guy, he came up behind me and he grabbed one of my boobs with one hand, and he grabbed my vagina. I told him to fuck off, and he pushed me onto the train tracks,” she recalled.

…

“There was no train coming, thank God,” Currie said. “I keep playing the scenario over in my head. There weren’t any MTA police on that particular track, so I don’t know what I would have done if there hadn’t been bystanders.”

Clearly, the defendant is guilty of assault and other crimes, but is he guilty of attempted murder?

At common law (the law we inherited from the British), attempted murder requires 2 things: 1) taking an action towards the death of someone (a “substantial step”), and 2) the intent that your actions result in the death of that person.  That second part is called a “specific intent” requirement.  That is, it’s not enough that you did what you did on purpose, but rather that you must, in your own mind, intend a specific result.  Modern New York law on the matter doesn’t substantially deviate from the common-law view.

The first element is not very interesting: pushing someone on a train track is undoubtedly a substantial step towards murder.  The second element is where the fun is.  Like any good law school essay question, you can argue that specific intent both ways.  You can argue that one doesn’t push someone onto train tracks unless they want them to die.  However, if your law school essay doesn’t also pick out the words, “There was no train coming,” you lost major points on this question.  The defense will argue that pushing someone onto an empty train track is unlikely to cause death and shows that the defendant didn’t actually intend that the victim die from the actions.

But New Yorkers love throwing the book at the bad guy, and so when Manhattan ADA Maxine Rosenthal decided to press attempted murder charges, the local Reddit community cheered:

Reddit Does Not Like Kimani

…and I was mocked for being a soft on crime or ignorant on the law, including by several “Internet lawyers,” for trying to explain the above…

too_soft

Unfortunately, no charity will be getting a $500 donation, as a Manhattan jury acquitted Mr. Stephenson of attempted murder last week:

“We felt he acted in a fit of rage and he wasn’t thinking enough to have premeditated anything,” said juror Catherine Wald, 64.

“There was no argument, proof or any evidence he had intent in the moment to kill her even though we all got convinced he was the perpetrator,” added foreman Dmytro Zhuravtsky, 44, who works in quantitative research at a large financial institution.

Fear not: the perpetrator still faces 25 years in prison on the first degree assault charge (which, if I’m reading correctly, comes with a 5 year mandatory minimum).  But, say it with me: it’s not attempted murder unless the defendant actually intended that the victim die.  On the situation presented here, I don’t know how the ADA intended to prove the specific intent beyond a reasonable doubt.  The charge should not have been brought.

The ADA and defense counsel were contacted for comment but have not replied as of the publication of this story.

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Three Down, One to Go: Final Year of Law School at NWCU

NWCU Enrollment Documents
My final course enrollment documents, for NWCU’s 4L program.

I announced that I was entering Northwestern California University‘s law program on November 16th, 2014, which was also the four-year anniversary of my first civil rights litigation.  Now three years later, I’ve taken my 3L final exams and I’m still on track to graduate in November 2018, attempting the California Bar Exam in February 2019.

I feel like my previous review of the school + study tips still accurately reflect my thoughts on the program.  tl;dr: all the tools to study the law are there, but there’s no one holding your hand to use them.  Proceed only if you have a passion for studying the law, because otherwise you won’t be able to stay with the 2+ hours per day, every day, for 4 years.

My school year having concluded, especially on a Friday, it’s time for a few beers…

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State Bar of California Agrees to Re-Write FYLSX Grading Description

Earlier this year I sued the State Bar of California for incorrectly stating that their “First Year Law Students Exam” consists of two sections — a multiple choice and a written section — that were graded equally.  In fact, the scaling methodology used to attempt to normalize the scores against previous sittings of the exam effectively made the written worth 37% more than the multiple-choice on the exam I sat for in June 2016.

Today I’ve reached a settlement agreement with the State Bar to re-write their grading policy to more accurately describe how the exam is actually graded.  The updated policy description will disclose to all preparing for the exam that:

Through a process known as “equating”, the multiple-choice raw scores will be converted to a scale with a theoretical maximum of 400 points. Because there are multiple forms of the examination, this process adjusts for the possible differences between forms and administrations of the examination in the average difficulty of the particular version of the examination that the applicant takes.
. . .
The raw essay scores will be converted, or “scaled” to a distribution that has the same mean and standard deviation of multiple-choice scale scores.

Although the process of normalizing to a mean and standard deviation is far from standard (math described here) and every mathematician I’ve spoken with has told me the accepted practice for grade scaling is to take the highest score earned, create a formula that makes it the highest score possible, and scale all other scores in line with that formula, the State Bar is free to use whatever formula they want so long as they don’t mislead exam takers.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the outcome and hope that future law students benefit from knowing that they better hit the sample essays much harder than the practice MCQ’s!  If you’re currently preparing, I also made a detailed post of study tips.

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How the California Bar Actually Grades the First Year Law Students’ Exam

fylsx-real-gradingI’ve made a few posts discussing California’s First Year Law Students’ Exam (the “FYLSX”), noting that I failed my first attempt by a fraction of a percent when the Bar applied a grading formula different from that which was advertised, and then, using the knowledge gained of their altered grading scheme, passed on my second try so spectacularly that the Bar published one of my essays as an example of how to write their exam.  I also briefly mentioned that I — as I’m known to do — filed suit to ask a judge to effectively require them to grade like they say they will and be more transparent about the exam and how they grade it.

The particular dispute was that they advertised that the multiple-choice section and the essay section of the exam would be “converted to the same 400-point scale” in order to “give[] these sections equal weight.”  When I received my score report from the first exam, I noticed that the scaling formula used by the bar resulted in it being impossible to score more than about 362 points even if every question was answered correctly, and likewise, it was possible to score far more than 400 points on the essays.

The attorney for the Bar assigned to the case disclosed additional documents, formerly considered to be secret and until now never disclosed to law students, to me yesterday that all but flatly admit that not only were the sections not weighted equally, but they also didn’t use a 400-point scale!  See if you can follow this tortured grading system they describe, because it took me several reads to figure it out:

Multiple-choice raw scores (i.e., number of items answered correctly) were equated to the June 1998, 2011, and October 2013 exams using 21 items that were common to each of these exams.  The equating formula was as follows:

Multiple Choice Scale = (3.4092 x raw multiple-choice score) + 21.6267

…

The candidates’ raw total essay scores were scaled to a score distribution that had the same mean and standard deviation as their multiple choice scores using the following formula:

Essay Scale = (2.3536 x raw essay total score) + -442.389

A candidate’s total score was the sum of that candidates’ multiple choice and essay scores.

What I gather from this is that 21 of the 100 multiple choice questions were repeats of previous years, and based on how well students did on those 21 questions, their grade on the entire 100 questions was curved.  Then, they calculated the average multiple choice score and the standard deviation, and curved the essay scores such that the average student gets the same score on that section as the multiple choice, and the score distribution was normalized to the same standard deviation.

From this it is clear:

  1. This has nothing to do with a 400-point scale per section.  The number 400 does not even appear in this internal document regarding their grading scheme.  The scale is created simply by comparing this group’s scores to previous scores and trying to curve it accordingly.  You’ll notice that if you plug in “100” as your raw multiple-choice score (a perfect 100 out of 100 questions) into the formula provided, the maximum score attainable is 362.5467.  Not 400.
  2. The sections do not have “equal weight.”  Saying that the average test taker got the same score on both their multiple-choice and their essay questions is not the same thing as saying “half your grade comes from multiple-choice, and half from the essays.”  Whether the essays count more or less than the multiple-choice section depends entirely on how well the other students do on their exams.  This is not equality, it is normalization.

So, for those taking the June 2017 exam, know this: on both exams I sat for, the essays counted far more than the multiple-choice.  You should therefore be spending far more time studying how to write a good essay than how to select A, B, C, or D correctly, unless your multiple-choice practice exams are turning out abysmally (for more study tips, see my previous post).  Hopefully by the October 2017 exam, a judge will have “persuaded” them to abandon this system.

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California Bar Posts My Essay as Example of How to Write Exam Answer

fylsx_q2I was pretty excited to be tipped off by one of my law school professors that the California Bar’s “Selected Answers” for the last administration of the First Year Law Students’ Exam were posted and that one of them looked familiar.

Each sitting of the exam, every student writes 4 essays, and out of the thousands written they picked mine for “Selected Answer A” to Question 2 of the October 2016 exam.

Pretty cool considering I’m presently suing the bar over the way they arbitrarily weight the essay sections and multiple-choice sections of the exam differently, despite promising that they don’t, and then refused to provide documents when confronted with a public records request (original post, new amended complaint).  It’s also amazing how 85 out of 100 was apparently the best score on this exam question, further highlighting the absurdity of their grading.  Hopefully I’ll be able to bring some transparency to their grading process so that law students can get an accurate idea of what to study and how their knowledge will be measured.

Nonetheless, I’m glad they like my writing! 🙂

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Jon Corbett Available for Legal Assistant / Research / Paralegal

For the entirety of my adult life, my day job has been in technology.  Now in my third year of law school and having written over a thousand pages of federal complaints, motions & oppositions, discovery requests & responses, and appellate documents in my time as a civil rights advocate (most of which have been posted on this blog), I’m looking to begin my transition to doing law professionally.  I’m available to small firms and solo practitioners on either a full or part time basis.  Naturally, a preference for any firm that does civil rights advocacy (Civil Rights Act, Bivens actions, FTCA, ADA, employment discrimination, etc.), but I’m pretty good with contracts, torts, and consumer rights, too.

Please pass to your lawyer friends and contact jon [at] professional-troublemaker [dot] com.

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