Class of 2017
graduates taking
the mock bar
exam held at
UND School of
Law in June.
offered each semester to prepare students for the experiential
course requirement (six credits of simulation courses or field
placements/externships). We adopted an Intensive Writing
Experience Requirement (three credits), so every second-year
student must complete a three-credit course that focuses on
upper-level mastery of legal writing. For example, in Legislation,
which Professor Julia Ernst re-designed to qualify as an Intensive
Writing Experience course, students are required to draft
legislation through multiple written assignments.
• We encourage faculty to incorporate bar exam testing methods
into their courses so students are better able to demonstrate their
knowledge and skills in the format of the bar exam. This past
year, Professor Patti Alleva led a group of faculty in discussions
based on the book, “Clearing the Last Hurdle: Mapping Success
on the Bar Exam.” (The author, Wanda Temm, is a nationally
recognized expert in incorporating bar passage efforts into a law
school’s curriculum. In fact, she visited the School of Law in 2013
as a Scholar-in-Residence to help jump-start our own efforts.)
Professor Eric Johnson, for example, incorporates short writing
exercises (akin to the MEE essay questions) and multiple-choice
quizzes and tests (akin to the MBE) in his Torts classes.
• For the first time this year, we offered all of our graduates a full,
two-day mock bar exam in June. School of Law staff and faculty
spent a weekend administering a mock exam–one day of MEE
and MPT questions and one day of MBE questions. We also
continue to expand and strengthen our efforts, such as making
more materials available online to our graduates who are studying
outside of Grand Forks and enhancing the support and advising
we provide to our graduates who are taking the bar exam after an
unsuccessful attempt.
Importantly, thanks to the change in the Supreme Court rules,
we now have data that will help us assess whether these efforts
are actually helping our graduates pass the bar exam. This year,
Professor Grant Christenson conducted an in-depth quantitative
analysis of the more detailed data we’ve received over the past
three years, and we are using that analysis to help us make
decisions about admissions, the curriculum, and student services.
We are exploring whether additional data will help us more
accurately determine which of our efforts are most effective, in
anticipation of possibly requesting an additional rule change
to provide more detailed information about how our graduates
perform on the bar exam.
We also remain engaged in the national conversations about
the bar exam; for example, in my role as a member of the ABA
Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar’s Bar
Admissions Committee, I advocated for release of students’
scores on the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination
(MPRE) to the students’ law schools. The MPRE is an additional
exam that is required for licensure in 48 states, including North
Dakota. Students typically take the MPRE while in law school,
and we are told that students’ performance on the MPRE is a
predictor of whether they will pass the bar exam, but we do not
get any information about how our students perform on the
MPRE (or even if they’ve passed or not), limiting our ability to
help students who may have struggled on the exam.
Again, we are all concerned about low bar pass rates, and we all
want our graduates to succeed. We are paying careful attention
to this issue and working hard to ensure our graduates are fully
qualified to become your colleagues in the bar.
SUMMER 2017
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