by Nadine AbousalemCommunications & Recruiting Coordinator for Law Career Development
In light of New York's announcement of switching to the uniform bar exam (UBE) starting in 2016, California has announced plans to adopt a two-day bar exam instead of its three-day predecessor starting July 2017. California is notorious for giving one of the most difficult bar exams in the country and is also known for being the last to publish bar passage results.
While many exam takers will be excited by the prospect of significantly less writing on the exam, California is not planning to make the bar exam any easier and will set the scoring to keep passage rates low and consistent with those of the three-day exam. However, the proposed two-day bar exam will only include one day of essays and one day of MBE, putting the California exam on par with other jurisdictions in terms of length and content. Each exam day will be weighted equally for the final score.
What does this mean for exam takers? While the three-day exam allowed those who do poorly on multiple choice questions to pad their scores with killer writing, there will now be a heavier emphasis on multiple choice. Multiple choice will now account for 50% of the exam score.
You may read more about the changes from Solo Practice University's blog post here.
