Friday, November 21, 2008, 5:58 pm: It has been 112 days and 58 minutes since I last heard, “Please stop typing,” on the third and final day of the California Bar exam. But the long wait is over for me and 229 of my SW classmates. In two minutes, I will be able to point, click, and find out whether I passed the toughest Bar exam in the nation.
Rewind back to August of 2005, I had just begun my first year at SW, and was bright-eyed and eager to absorb all that Prof. Dorff had to teach about Contracts. The Bar exam was not yet even a thought in my mind.
But as second year progressed, I figured out that I might actually want to practice law and should start thinking about the Bar exam. I decided to buy into the conventional wisdom and take a few recommended Bar classes (i.e. Community Property and Remedies) so that I would not be seeing these subjects for the first time during my Bar prep.
Perhaps I was an anomaly, but other than the material taught in my classes, I rarely thought of the Bar exam again until the end of third year. That was when I finally let two bar prep companies charge thousands of dollars to my credit card.
Suddenly it was May 2008, and SW graduation day had arrived. My three years of law school seemed to have passed by at warp speed. I quickly found out that the excitement of graduation would zoom by just as speedily. Graduation was on a Sunday, and on the very next Monday morning, I started my Multi-State Bar course, followed immediately by my two-month intensive review class.
Those two months of bar study were “hideous,” as my girlfriend would say. At the time, they were the most hideous two months I had experienced in the three years since law school began. Why? Because if you take your Bar studies seriously (as you should because (1) you will never want to take it again, and (2) because not only is your reputation on the line, but so are those of your school and classmates) you should put in about eight hours a day the first few weeks, kick it up to ten hours the next few weeks, and during the last few weeks, you wake up, crack the books, and don’t close them until you go to bed. Literally.
The Monday before the Bar exam, you move into a hotel room in Ontario (or wherever you decide to take it) and prepare yourself for three straight six-hour days of furious typing (I pity people that still write by hand, ouch!). On Tuesday morning, the “fun” begins at 9:00 a.m. sharp.
The funny thing about taking the bar exam is that it really does fly by fast. During lunch on Day 1, you worry about the essays you wrote that morning, but an hour later you’re back in the midst of a daunting three-hour performance exam. Then – all of a sudden – it’s Day 2; you’ve done 100 multiple choice questions and are halfway through the Bar exam. Before you know it, it’s 5:00 p.m. on Day 3 and the guy on the microphone is telling you to, “Please stop typing.”
I wish there had been a way to fast-forward the next 3 ½ months, but time seemed to stand still. As my classmates and I soon found out, the 112 days of waiting for bar results were much more excruciating than actually studying for the fifteen Bar subjects. You constantly find yourself ruminating over essay responses and multiple choice answers, convincing yourself all the while that you will be taking the exam again in February.
The clock has now struck 6:00 p.m. on November 21, 2008. My girlfriend and I are on opposite ends of the room. She checks her results first. Click. “Yessssss,” she says. She tries to contain her excitement until after I check mine. I run over and check her screen to make sure I know what to look for if I should somehow happen to pass.
Then, at 6:03 p.m., I type in my password and click away. “The name above appears on the pass list for the July 2008 California Bar Examination.” Wait, did I pass? I read it again. Oh my God, I passed. Let the jumping, hollering, drinking, and more jumping begin.
Even now, looking back and knowing that I passed, I would not wish those 112 days of waiting on anyone. But, I guess in some strange way, it’s all just a part of the elitist, unnecessarily rigorous, stress-inducing process we must all go through to become lawyers.
On November 21, 2008, 72% of SW’s first-time bar takers found out that they passed the exam, which was up 8% from 2007, including: 129 of 175 Day students, 11 of 20 Evening students, 21 of 31 SCALE students, and 4 of 4 PLEAS students.
The numbers are exciting in and of themselves. SW students improved dramatically over the percentages from the year before. Unfortunately for SW, local Southern California law schools also improved, which may affect SW’s ability to rise in the law school rankings. UCLA had a 90% pass rate for first-time takers; Pepperdine, 89%; Loyola, 87%; and Chapman, 77%. The only ABA-accredited school that SW surpassed was La Verne, which scored at 61%.
With only 50% of the bottom half of SW’s graduating class of 2008 passing the bar – compared with nearly 95% for the top half – and only 19 of 42 students formerly on academic probation passing, it seems as though the SW administration has its target group clearly identified.
A number of positive changes occurred during my time at SW, including: curriculum changes, new clinics, and a new Dean. Dean Garth and his administration have been trying desperately to figure out how to catch up with the other Southern California law schools in terms of bar passage, but it looks like there’s quite a bit more ground to cover.
Written By Marc Baranov, Alumnus 2008
