Board of Law Examiners to Institute Change in Bar Examination in February
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 17 No. 9 Pg. 1746 |
| Pages | 1746 |
| Publication year | 1988 |
1988, September, Pg. 1746. Board of Law Examiners to Institute Change in Bar Examination in February
A change in format is scheduled for the Colorado bar examination beginning in February of 1989. On that examination, a type of question never before asked will be used. This new form of testing is called the performance test and will be implemented on an experimental basis. It will not become a permanent part of the exam until its effects have been analyzed. However, it will count in the February 1989 examination scores.
The Colorado performance test will consist of two thirtyminute questions and will be administered on the same day as the essay exam. The two performance test questions will replace three of the twenty essay questions now asked on the bar examination. The weight of the performance test in the overall scoring of the examination will be 7 1/2 percent.
The introduction of the performance test is one of several changes that have been made in the evolution of Colorado bar examinations. Before 1972, the bar examination consisted of only essay questions; beginning in 1972, the Multistate Bar Examination ("MBE") was added. The MBE is a 200-question, multiple choice exam administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and prepared with the technical assistance of American College Testing ("ACT").
The reasons the MBE was chosen as a testing medium were numerous. First, the careful preparation of the MBE by experienced bar examiners and law professors (with the assistance of testing experts from ACT) helps ensure a fairer and better examination than usually can be prepared by state bar examiners who have limited time to devote to drafting exam questions. Second, the multiple choice format allows more areas of the law to be covered than essay questions; thus, a broader range of knowledge can be tested. Third, subjective standards in grading are replaced with objective standards, since the MBE is machine graded. Finally, and perhaps the most important, comparison of scores from one test administration to another can be effected with confidence that two identical scores show the same level of competence. This is so because scores from current administrations of the MBE are "scaled" to prior administrations of the examination. This is done by reusing some questions from a prior MBE, comparing results from the two administrations and adjusting the final scores accordingly.(fn1) Thus, the MBE has a number of advantages that essay examinations do not.
In 1981, the next major change in the Colorado Bar Examination was instituted. Prior to that date, the essay...
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