Bar Exam Test-Taker Sues Over ‘Unlawful’ Scoring Method

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The National Conference of Bar Examiners, The Pennsylvania Board of Law Examiners, The New Jersey Board of Law Examiners, and the three individual chairs of each board have all been named as defendants in a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a law school graduate who takes issue with the defendants’ scoring of their respective bar examinations. The plaintiff reportedly completed the Pennsylvania bar exam in 2015 and the New Jersey bar exam in 2016 and received a failing score both times, according to the complaint. The suit argues that the single score given to the plaintiff each time he completed the exam is not an accurate representation of his knowledge of the subject due to implicit errors in the test itself and its administration.

The complaint proposes that the defendants instead base their grading on test-takers’ “score band,” which it describes as a range of scores calculated with each exam’s standard deviation that accounts for any possible errors. “So long as the bar passage cutoff score is within the score band,” the complaint explains, “a test-taker must be deemed to have met that cutoff score and passed the exam.” The suit argues that the plaintiff would have passed the bar exam both times if the defendants had measured his score band against the bar cutoff instead of a single score.