Pre-law students are rightly still focused on the LSAT, the critical admissions exam they’ll need to get into law school, and the admissions process in general, but here’s some information that they’ll need to know as 1L’s and you should know too as in-the-know advisers: come February 2015, the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) portion of the bar exam will see its biggest changes in years. The MBE is a standardized test created by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) in 1972 to assess the extent to which an examinee can apply fundamental legal principles and legal reasoning to analyze given fact patterns. It is currently administered by 49 of the 50 U.S. states (all except Louisiana) as part of the requirement for admission to the bar. In most states, the MBE accounts for 40% to 50% of your bar exam score.
The MBE currently has 6 sections: Constitutional Law; Contract; Criminal Law and Procedure; Evidence; Real Property; and Torts. In what is the biggest change to the MBE in nearly 35 years, a seventh section, Federal Civil Procedure, is being added. To accommodate for the addition of the new section and keep the test the same length, 5-6 questions will be shaved from each of the current sections — so instead of six sections with 31-33 questions each, the MBE will have seven sections with 27-28 questions each. It will remain a 200-question, 6-hour exam.
The NCBE has not given a specific reason for the change, though it has been deliberating changes for nearly 10 years. Civil Procedure is currently a topic that’s part of the first year curriculum at most law schools, so including it would add some consistency. There’s also been a movement in the field of legal education towards making law school students more “practice-ready.”
We know from what students tell us that Civil Procedure tends to be one of the more challenging areas of study. Adding a section to the MBE in an area of study that students have traditionally found difficult will make the exam more challenging overall. For many bar takers, it will mean they’ll be ‘double tested’ on Civil Procedure, since it’s a topic often covered on state essays and on the Multistate Essay Exam (MEE), which is required by more than half of U.S. jurisdictions
We know this is a few years down the line, but definitely good to keep in the know. Certainly no pre-law student should be discouraged in any way from applying because of this. And as highly motivated as they are, we doubt they will.
