Stuff You Should Know - What's the bar exam like anyway?

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

You've always heard about "the bar" but what do you really know about it? Unless you've taken it, probably not much. Well join the club. Let's discuss.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions, are all being released on Audible, on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

is already out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed is Snape,

and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score, and the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform 9 and 3 quarters, and it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series will be released

every month until all seven are out. Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, The Trey to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby and why he chose not to return to it just like that.

You listen to, Are you a Charlotte? on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, get this. We are re-releasing our wildly popular, maybe the greatest selling record of all time. Album, it's a vinyl album that features our vinyl episode, vinyl records, colon, black magic at work. That's right. We partnered up once again with Born Losers Record. They did such a great job on that first run.

They sold art really quickly, and they said, hey, guys, Christmas is coming up. If you want to do it again, and we thought that was a great idea. So available on November 28th, which is Black Friday, which is also record store release day, you can buy our album. You can go to syskvinyl.com to see details, and you can also buy these things in record stores. Yeah, 300 of them online, 300 of them in record stores, which makes them a collector's item by definition. So don't wait. Act now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production, of IHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is one of those good old-fashioned rootin-tootin, Rudy-Fruity episodes of stuff you should know. Rudy, Tootty, Fresh, and Frudy. That's right. I forgot the rest of it, but yes, you knew it I was laying down. Can I shock you right off the bat?

Yes. I don't think I have ever. been in an IHop restaurant in Eden? I don't think so. See, this is normally where I'd be like, what? Yeah. But I don't think you're missing enough to warrant a what. Yeah.

I mean, it was always Waffle House, if we were going to do something like that. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, never been in an IHop. The two are actually not really that comparable to tell you the truth. I mean, if you went to a Waffle House and then went to an IHop, wouldn't be like been to one, been to the other. Their menus are different enough. The vibes different enough. Is IHOP more relatable to like a Denny's? Yes. Okay, I've been to Denny's,

but not much. Then you don't need to go to IHont. Can we thank the listener who suggested this episode? Yeah, I remember their email, but I don't remember their name. Yeah, because I finally actually wrote it down and we're not doing it weeks later, but this came from listener Rowan, and I'm not sure how to pronounce this last name, but I'm going to go with Garandesie. That's a great name. Garand Daisy? I like Garand Daisy more because of the Daisy part.

Yeah, but Rowan wrote in and I was like, you know what? I think someone in Rowan's life had taken the bar, and I think they realized that they didn't know much about it, and I was like, you know, I've never really thought much about the bar exam, and I don't know anything about it. Well, didn't they also send like a little clip or an anecdote? about how crazy it gets during the test, like how nuts people will, or what not so links they'll go to to finish? Yeah, yeah.

I think I do remember that, actually. We'll save it. Save it. Let's talk about the bar exam, Chuck. For those people who aren't aware, and from what I can understand, essentially every country in the world that has lawyers has a bar exam, but it's the test that you have to take, in most places, to become a practicing attorney, to become licensed as an attorney. And that's it. There's bar exam, everybody. Good, bye. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they, they, the word bar is there because I think it's named after the literal bar railing in a courtroom that divides the public from, you know, the business end.

Right. Where they, yeah, where you're not really supposed to go past or else a bailiff will jump on you. Yeah, exactly. I remember there was a local news story once about a judge who'd been drinking, like, during work. Uh-huh. And, like, they followed him, like, on his lunch hour and followed him into, like, a place where he's drinking. Uh-huh. They were, like, teeing up the story, and they said, this judge not only passed the bar, he went in and drank at it. And that, I mean, like, I saw that 15 years ago, and it stuck with me ever since.

That's so lazy. It is, but, I mean, I thought it was pretty good to do. Tell you the truth. Yeah. Well, that's like in the old days when we were writers for How StuffWorks.com and like a shining week

is when I wrote a clever, what do you call the thing under the picture? Caption. Caption. Now I can't even remember caption with the word caption. It's all far away.

Do you remember any good ones? No, no. But I was like, hey, Emily, check this out. I wrote a clever caption. It was my first professional writing job. So I was, you know, showing pride. No, I remember that.

We used to tell one another our great, clever captions. Yeah, look at this one. Music lyrics we'd fit in to articles that we just thought we were so sly about. Yeah, and now we just say dumb things with our mouths. Right.

Well, I feel like we've shaken off all of the curious lawyers who don't normally listen to us so we can get started, everybody. One of the things about the bar exam, I never understood, and I would guess also that most people out there who aren't

attorneys or aspiring attorneys wouldn't really get, but there's a lot a criticism about the bar exam. It's just not, it's not just some tests that lawyers have to take to get licensed, which on its face sounds great because like with any professional licensing that protects the public from incompetent lawyers, they have to show that they understand a minimum standard of how to practice law that will prevent them from being such a dipstick that their clients are going to get electrocuted because they represented them so poorly. It's way more intricate than that.

Yeah. Socially speaking, culturally speaking, socioculturally speaking. Yeah. Because you don't want to end up with the Lionel Hutz, right? No. He almost certainly did not pass the bar. Well, we'll get to it. But you don't necessarily have to pass the bar in every state in the United States to practice law. But sit on it, everybody, because that's coming. I guess we should go back in time and talk about a little bit of the history, because if you go back to colonial days, pre-states in the United States, or not in the United States, but, you know, what will one day be the United States?

Goodbye rest of the curious lawyers. Exactly. There were no bar exams because there were no law schools. If you wanted to work as a lawyer, you would apprentice or clerk for a practicing lawyer for, you know, sometimes you would just do it and donate your time to working for them. Sometimes you would do that and actually pay them. Right. Which, you know, it seems like a pretty good system.

And we'll talk more about apprenticing later because for my money, I think that's a pretty good way to do things. Yeah. But by 1750, which is pretty early on, all of the colonies got on board basically and said, all right, we need standards for people to do this job. And we need to kind of all agree on what that's going to be. Yeah, and like a lot of stuff are most things with American law, they were following in the tradition of England. which had had some sort of exam or another for people to become attorneys as far back as the 16th century. But America wasn't that far behind, you know, a couple hundred years. Apparently the first one was Delaware in 1783.

And it was essentially just you would go and hang out with a judge and they would quiz you on some legal stuff. Yeah. And if you got it right, you were accepted to the bar. You were an attorney from that point on. it was okay for you to practice. It was also supposedly looked on as very easy, too. Yeah. I imagine a lot of that depended on the judge that you got and like maybe how much they liked you in those early days. It was really sort of the Wild Wild West. Right. Libya helped us with this, and she dug up a pretty fun story about Abraham Lincoln, who was a bar examiner for the state of Illinois in the 1850s and was apparently just like at a

hotel chatting with a lawyer in a room, and the lawyer answered a few questions, and Lincoln was like, congratulations, you're an attorney. So great, man. Yeah. Yeah, I love that story, too. I mean, I can just see Lincoln busting it out so casually. Yeah, I think the takeaway is the guy didn't even know the test had begun, essentially. No, he had no idea. Exactly. I'm glad you added that part. Sure. So the actual first written bar example, kind of like they are today, that popped up around 1855, I think, in Massachusetts, and then it became a requirement about 20 years later in Suffolk County where Boston was. And by 1920, written exams were like the way to go.

And because now it wasn't just getting quizzed with the judge, law school started popping up and developing to kind of train you to prepare for that written exam at the very least. And they actually became an alternative to apprenticing, which, as you'll see later on, is kind of inverted these days. But that was something you could do if, like, say, all of the lawyers in your town were jerks. Yeah. You could go to a law school instead of apprenticing. When you graduated law school, then you could take your bar exam.

Those were your two ways, your two paths to the bar exam back then. Yeah. By 1921, the American Bar Association was around. and they said, you know, we really prefer a written exam to license. I don't think they mandated it at that point. Yeah. But they, you know, the states generally kind of fell in line behind the ABA. And I think by 1931, another decade later, the American Association of Law Schools got together with the committee.

And they said, all right, we need to develop a real system here. So they came together with the national conference of bar examiners. And at that time, 1930s, they were really, like, the testing that they were concerned about was what they called black letter law, just sort of really unambiguous black and white, yes or no, answers to things on, like, you know, how things are literally legally defined and not a lot of, like, you know, hypotheticals being bandied about, which you're going to get, yeah, exactly, which you're going to get more these days in the bar exam. Yeah, but one of the problems with taking a test like that. is that your hand can get cramped. They didn't want prospective lawyers' hands cramping. So in 1972, the National Conference of Bar Examiners came up with the multi-state bar examination.

And that created a multiple choice test. Yeah. It also really kind of dug into, like, your knowledge. But at the same time, you can also say, like, this is where it became a little more standardized and less loosey-goosey. But in that sense, it also became a little more scientific-minded by creating a test that you can say, this is right, this is wrong.

And it wasn't just legal terms. They were applying it to hypothetical situations, but it was still multiple choice, so you could grade it much more easily. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about multiple choice in a test like this. Anytime you can sort of guess. Right. I don't think you can necessarily guess your way to success, but I don't know. I think you just came up with a t-shirt. Casual aid of success.

Yeah, totally. And then on the back, just to A, B, C, and just a check mark next to the C. All of the above. All of the above. Go ahead. You go ahead. Oh, well, as this is sort of developing over the decades, I think we're at the 70s here, but it kind of became clear during this period that, like, hey, what we've got here

is a gatekeeping service, essentially. ostensibly the reason was like you said is like we want to keep only like you know really knowledgeable people that know what they're doing in these jobs to protect people that hire them for lots and lots of money but as this was happening it became even more clear that there was a side effect of that which was you know immigrants black people other people of color that were vying to become attorneys were having a harder time and this is evident really early on in 1912, they accidentally admitted three black attorneys into the ABA because they didn't have, you know, like check here for race. And then they were like, oh, goodness, we accidentally let in three black attorneys. So we need to start screening basically for race. Yeah, they said we need to add a check here for race thing on the application to take the bar exam. And that's essentially what they did.

So from 1912 all the way to 1943, if you checked African-American or God knows what they had down for you to check back then, you were just not allowed to take the bar exam. Sorry. Like this is, it was an actual, like you said, a gatekeeping mechanism to prevent black people from becoming lawyers in the United States. And so in 1925, prospective black lawyers said nuts to that. And they got together with actual black lawyers, and they came up with the National Bar Association, which is still around today, as an alternative for black attorneys to basically become attorneys rather than have to go through the ABA. Yeah. And, you know, since then, especially in like the 1970s, there seem to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers in different states. that were suing over various what they felt were, you know, discriminatory policies within the test.

I don't think many of those were successful, though, were they? No. The one that sticks out the most that I've heard the most described as, well, just basically a good example of the lawsuits that came around at this time was Tyler v. V. V. Vickory, it was a class action suit. that alleged that Georgia's bar examinations cut score, which is the minimum score you have to have to pass, had been adjusted with the introduction of the multi-state bar exam. Remember the multiple choice test that they introduced? That it had basically been introduced and designed to continue to keep black people from passing the bar exam. And the Fifth Circuit Court of Georgia said, we don't really think that's true. For some reason, they said, we don't.

don't see any intent to discriminate, which is neither here nor there under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents employment discrimination. Yeah. But they also said, here's the thing, the American Bar Association is not an employer. They're not a labor organization. They're not an employment agency. So therefore, Title VII doesn't really apply to them. And the court said, ABA continue to discriminate through the bar exam as you see fit. Yeah, that, I'm not, I don't know much about lawyer stuff. I don't know spit about lawyer. In my, no spit.

In my civilian mind, I see that as kind of a punt, legally speaking. And maybe that's, you know, a lot of times you decide something on precedent and whether or not you feel it's right or not. That's just the precedent. But I don't know, that felt like a punt to me by saying like, well, they're not an employer or an agency or labor organization. So we're just sort of not going to hear this one. Yeah, and this reveals to me something that I just find fascinating is when lawyers sue other lawyers or bodies of lawyers or judges rule on the test that it takes to create lawyers and therefore judges, it just seems so fraught with basically opinion because they're so, like, it's not like the judge is learning about this for the first time they're coming at it from fresh eyes.

Like this is like part of their fabric as having been a law student and becoming a lawyer and then becoming a judge. you know? Yeah. I just find it fascinating. Yeah, totally. Should we wrap up sort of the testing stuff and then take a break? Yeah, let's get back into the evolution of the test again. Yeah, so now we're in the late 80s, 1988. I'm a junior in high school still seeking that first kiss. And the NCBE has added the multi-state essay examination at this point. So now you're back to essaying, which is how it previously had been until that multiple choice test. Right. And in 97, it, um, handed over the multi-state performance test or the MPT, which says,

hey, let's, um, sort of do, like, do some practice stuff, like, write up a brief for me or write out a memo, draft a memo, and let's see how you do on that. And then finally, in 2011, uh, the uniform bar examiner, the UBE was adopted by most states, uh, where all three of those tests kind of make that one up is one. big test. Yeah, which is, you know, if you're a state and you don't feel like going to the trouble coming up with your entire, your own bar exam, now you can just use the UBE. Yeah. And it's, it's proven. Like, it's, there's all sorts of great questions in there. You sacrificed state law. But a lot of people say like, well, like law students don't need to sit around and memorize state law. That's a

waste of time in favor of the UBE, which is pretty rich because a lot of people. lot of people argue that the UBE itself is a waste of time because you have to memorize general law rather than state law, which we'll talk more about that. I just, I'm chomping at the bit right now. Yeah, but it did make it like more easy to transfer from state to state and stuff like that. Right. And we'll get into those specifics too. But let's take that break. Okay. And we'll get into the basics of the bar right after this. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions are all being released on Audible on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is already out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledoreau. Matthew McFaddy in as Baltimore, Riz Ahmed as Snape, and Cush Jumbo as the narrator.

And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score. And the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform 9 and 3 quarters, and it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series will be released every month until all seven are out.

Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, The Trey to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte. Charlotte, a cardboard baby. Why would I bring her a cardboard baby? I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all.

When he found out Trey's shortcomings... I'm kind of excited at talking about, you know, I think he's a guy spends time in Central Park, you know. He's probably, you know, he'll be some surgery stuff, you know. And I was like, all this kind of stuff going on. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. And they said, but he's impotent. And I was like, he's impotent.

And why he chose not to return to him just like that. They came and presented an idea, and I was like, I get, I see it. It's kind of a one joke idea. You don't want to miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, get this. We are re-releasing our wildly popular, maybe the greatest selling record of all time, album.

It's a vinyl album that features our vinyl episode, vinyl records, colon, black magic at work. That's right. We partnered up once again with Bourne. Losers Record. They did such a great job on that first run. They sold out really quickly and they said, hey, guys, Christmas is coming up. You want to do it again. And we thought that was a great idea. So available on November 28th, which is Black Friday, which is also record store release day. You can buy our album. You can go to syskvinyl.com to see details. And you can also buy these things in record stores. Yeah, 300 of them online, 300 of them in record stores, which makes them a collector's item by definition. So don't wait. Act now. So, Chuck, it turns out there's 56 jurisdictions in the United States. Who knew? I didn't. 50 states plus some territories.

You got some overseas possessions. You got a, you know. What else? So there's 56, and each jurisdiction has its own, like, highest agency that basically says these are the standards to become a lawyer in the state. And again, a lot of them just said, you have to pass the uniform bar exam. That's the standard. But they also can kind of mess with it here or there. And it's up to this agency that's associated with the highest court in the state, usually the state Supreme Court. Yeah, exactly. In most jurisdictions, if you, just to take the bar exam, you have to have graduated from an accredited law school from the American Bar Association,

which usually means a three-year program. Some states, though, are like, hey, if you didn't go to an accredited school, that's fine. We'll still let you take the bar. If you are in Washington state, Virginia, Vermont, or California, they allow a legal apprenticeship to swap out law school, which I think is super kind of cool. Yeah.

And Maine and New York let you sub-out like a year or two of that law school for an apprenticeship. Yeah, for sure, which is pretty neat. It's old school. It's a throwback kind of thing. Yeah. If you want to take the bar exam, most of the time it's given in February and July. Those are your two options. And then you're going to pay some money for it.

And there's a lot of ways you're going to pay money for it. Just to register to take it, the bar exam itself, it can be a few hundred dollars. It can be more than $1,000. depending on your state and how greedy they are. Yeah. If you want to use a laptop, you want to type out your briefs and your memos and your essays rather than write them out

because you get hand cramps like the old lawyers used to. Yeah. You're going to have to pay a fee for that. And the reason why is because there is no chance you're going to be allowed to bring your own laptop. No. Because they keep the place so tight and are so hawkish about,

preventing cheating, that they actually provide tampons to people who need them because you're not allowed to bring in your own tampon. Wow. Really? Yeah, it's happened. And apparently it's not just an isolated thing that they have a bowl of tampons. Wow. And you grab one if you need it and you hope that they don't run out if you really need it. So yeah, it's like there's no way you're bringing your own laptop in. Yeah, or tampon. Exactly. So, wow, I never knew that. That's a nice little tidbit. Thanks.

I thought that was pretty great, too. So you have to have money to register, like you said. You have to have money to, you know, a lot of times people take off work for several months. So you have to have a life that can do that, you know, which indicates a certain amount of at least either privilege or maybe hard work and saving, if that's how you did it, which is great. And then almost assuredly you have paid several thousand dollars, maybe as much as $6,000 to take preparatory courses. About 60% of the market share in the United States is a company called B-A-R-B-R-I-B-R-I-B-R-R-I-B-R-R-B-R-R-B-R-R-B-R-R-R-E can be up to $6,000, maybe as low as $1,800. And they have been around since the 1950s, and I was like, what does Barbary stand for? And I had a weirdly hard time finding out what it stood for until, sadly, Wikipedia just turned it up.

I should have gone to the most obvious place. But I think when they merged in 2021, or no, no, no, they merged in the 70s, I think. And it was just the names of two companies. I think Bay Area Review was B-A-R and the Bar Review, Inc. was BRI. And so they just squashed those together. So kind of a boring story. I had seen that it was a merger of Barbizon Modeling School and Bree, meaning the makers of Bree cheese around the world.

Wow, that's a matchup I could enjoy. Right. And the $6,000 one that you can pay for, like the premium test prep, they actually have somebody to take the test for you and they even provide the person with a wig that matches your hair. So it looks a lot like you too. I did see, though, they have a guarantee if you do not. But if you pay that money to them and you don't pass the bar, I think you get to take the course again for free one more time if you're taking the exam again.

Okay. That's not bad. So you don't get your money back, but you get to retake the course at no charge. No. Barber's on modeling as long as had a motto, you don't get your money back. Right. Yeah, exactly. So let's break down the UBE, the uniform bar examination, which is the culmination of decades of the National Conference of Bar.

Bar examiners, hard work, sweat, blood, tears, joy, pain. Yeah. And again, you can break it out in the three parts that kind of came along separately. The first, remember, was that multiple choice test, the multi-state bar examination. Yeah. There's 200 multiple choice questions. I've seen 175. I guess it depends on, I don't know, your jurisdiction and how much, how valuable they find 25 questions.

Yeah, maybe. But it covers seven different areas of the law. You want to take them? Sure. Simple procedure, contracts, of course. Nice. Torts. Ooh.

Constitutional law. Criminal law, that's sexiest law. Careful. Criminal law and procedure, that is. Evidence, which is its own category, and real property. Kaching. And that is 50% of the UBE score. Then the other two are the multi-state essay, once again, which is 30%.

And then the two multi-state performance test, tasks, and that is 20%. Yeah. So you're like, okay, I could take that, no problem. Sure, you might be able to take it. You probably wouldn't pass. And you'd give up 12 hours plus of your life, 12 hours just of the test. It's spread out over three days technically, but the UBE takes up two of those days.

12 hours, divided by two days, divided by four sessions. So three in the morning, three in the afternoon, go to your whole. hotel room, can't sleep, toss and turn, come back the next morning, three in the morning, three in the afternoon. Yeah, oh, well, we should mention too. That's another reason you might be paying some extra money if you don't live near a testing site, like travel and room and board and all that stuff. Good point.

And scotch at the end of the day, of course. That's right. It's graded on a 400-point scale. Depends on the state on what they consider passing. Generally, 260 to 270. I said state, of course, jurisdiction. And then apparently it's like, it's not like acing the bar gets you anything more than passing the bar. You pass it, and that's great.

But I have some inside info from attorney friends, which I'll kind of dabble in here and there. But I think it's sort of untoward to, you don't go in and be like, ooh, ace the bar. Yeah, I saw a Reddit post where somebody posted like, I got a score of 330. And, I mean, is that high? I don't mean to make anybody who's got. lower than that feel bad, but I'm just curious, like, what do you guys think? And it was like, you disgust us. Like, that is just sad. So, yeah, it's not really cool to flex on people over your bar score. And you pass. Exactly. That's all that matters. That's right. And then if you do

pass, there's always a gaggle of attorneys, usually quite experienced seasoned attorneys who just are waiting for you to finish. And when you finish, they embrace you. And that's how you know that you've passed the bar exam. We did mention that those UBE scores are portable. It's not like the old days when you had to pass that state's bar. You know, I think that's how it used to be kind of across the board. Right. They're transferable for two to five years after taking the exam.

It depends on the jurisdiction, of course. And then if you're in a jurisdiction that doesn't utilize that UBE test, Most of them still have the MBE as a big part of their exam, usually with their own specific, like, state law stuff if they do that. And there's usually also a third day, what you were talking about earlier, that third test, which is like a 60-question ethics test. Right. It's called the multi-state professional responsibility examination, the M-P-R-E. Yes. And they ask you questions.

It's scored separately, but they have questions like, you know, Attorney Lionel Hutz brought in a bag of pot to one of his clients into prison is Attorney Hutz guilty of loving too much. Right. Was that a real Simpson thing? No. Oh, okay, because I could see that.

They only really talked about pot like on a couple of really great episodes, but, you know. No, that wasn't their bag, not normally. No, that wasn't their bag of pot. No, yeah. That wasn't their sack? Don't use that word.

Yeah, sack's kind of gross, isn't it? Moist? Oh, boy. What was the other one? Moist sack? Oh. Or pussy? Go look that up in the transcript.

Don't do it. Let's talk about pass rates because it really obviously depends on the state. They can vary pretty wildly, actually, from looking at some of these stats. I think for first timers from July of this year's testing, Mm-hmm. 2025, first-timer pass rates. There was a range, like, from 66% in Connecticut to almost 90% in Utah. So go Utah.

If you look at overall rates, not necessarily just first-timers, 2025, only 54% in the state of Alabama, once again, compared to 86 in Utah. So I don't know what's in the water out there in Utah, but those attorneys are sipping it up. Oh, it's widely considered a really easy state to pass the bar. Oh, is it really? Yeah. Oh, interesting. some very hard places to take the bar around the world actually that i saw it nigeria singapore korea japan ontario canada canada okay new york state all like new york state's bar exam is so

difficult it's like as hard as the entire nations of singapore's um so there are it definitely varies by jurisdiction and by country just how hard it can be wow that's interesting uh i do know that of the 22 graduates, this is just another sort of stat for you. Over 90% of graduates from accredited schools passed within a couple of years. But from what I see, there's really no shame for it to take a crack or two to pass the bar. I don't think, I don't know if it's something you're going to run around the office telling people on your first day. But I don't think it's like a mark of shame. There have been plenty of very successful attorneys, very famous attorneys that didn't pass the bar on the first go, including Michelle Obama.

And Hillary Clinton and all the DEMs. I think JFK, yeah, a bunch of DIMs. JFK Jr, I think, took two or three times to pass. I saw that. And, oh, Kim Kardashian took a time or two. Yeah, I think three. Three? And there's actually limits on how many times you can take it,

depending on your state, your jurisdiction, your territory. Oh, well, they just say, sorry. It sounds like you should try. another line of work. There are some places that say that. I don't know if they actually say that. The gaggle of attorneys tells you that when you fail the sixth time. But there are other places that have discretionary rules where after you reach a certain number,

like say, I think six is the highest I've seen, you can apply to take it again. You can basically go to the state bar and be like, please, I want to be a lawyer so bad. I'm just really terrible at this. Yeah, I mean, it is a test, and some people aren't great test takers. We'll kind of talk about that in a little bit, but also, I imagine there's plenty of things you can do with the law degree if you haven't passed a bar, right? Yeah, I mean, it's great. Like, you see somebody referred to like, oh, this is a lawyer or something, but they have, like, they're in some field that has nothing to do with law. Yeah.

You're just, like, they very frequently are advisors, like, just, they know how far you can bend the law. There's a lot of stuff you can do with it. All right, yeah. You can always teach, I imagine. Oh, yeah, that's you. I have a little cute little addition addendum to this part. Let's go. The youngest person ever to pass the bar is Sophia Park.

She passed the bar in 2024 at age 17 years, eight months. Was that after law school even? Yeah, she started law school at 13. Oh, she's one of those. So she beat the previous record by three months. The previous record had been set at age, I guess, 18 years in one month by her brother, Peter. Man. Isn't that nuts?

It's a smart family. It is. They really wanted to be lawyers. Yeah. Or, you know, are they practicing law or are they just like, I just wanted to show off? Oh, I believe they're both practicing law. Yeah, I guess so. Well, should we take another break, Chuck? I guess we should.

Well, one more little tidbit here at the end. We said that a bar exam is basically to say, hey, you can practice law. The one other thing that it does is it helps determine what schools can teach it because the ABA requires that law schools, if you want to be in an accredited law school, a certain percentage of your graduates have to pass the bar within two years. Otherwise, you're accredited. goes away. Yeah, I saw 75% of your graduates have to pass. All right, or they're like, sorry, I guess you're not teaching well enough. Exactly. I wanted my tidbit to be last, so I'm just going to repeat it now, okay? I had on second thought. We'll just go to break. How about that? All right. We'll be right back. Hey, Harry Potter fans, huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions are all being released on Audible on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is already out.

You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed is Snape, and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score. And the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there.

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and the next installments in the series will be released every month until all seven are out. Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, The Trey to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby.

Why would I bring her a cardboard baby? I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all. When he found out Trey's shortcomings. I'm kind of excited at talking about, you know, I think he's a guy who spends time in Central Park. You know, he's probably, you know, he'll be some surgery stuff, you know. And I was like, all this kind of stuff going on. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. And they said, but he's impotent.

And I was like, he's impotent. And why he chose not to return to it just like that. They came and presented an idea. And I was like, I get, I see it. It's so kind of a one joke idea. Right. You don't want to miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What were some of the memories from your U.S.O. tours? That nobody knew who I was and they were like, why do we have to say hello to this guy? Recently on the Good Stuff podcast, we sat down with our friend Bradley Cooper to talk about family. What is the good stuff to you? I mean, of course it's my daughter. His deep friendship with host Jacob. He was there when I found out that I was going to have a baby, which was incredible. I remember that.

You showed me the picture. You're like, what's that mean? And I was like, oh, my God. Did you ever tell the clinician story on this? Which one? Well, they're the handcuffed. Oh, dude. And how they've been there for each other through the hard times.

You know, I've been lucky enough to have dealt with some issues early on, you know, relatively early on in my life. And I was able to sort of walk Jacob through some stuff. Yeah, next month I'll be eight years clean and sober. You were a big time part of that. I leaned on you real heavy. I think times that you knew and times you didn't know. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we're back with more critiques and problems on the bar because if you start to do a little digging, it turns out there's been a lot of, a lot of that over the years for a lot of different reasons. You know, we've mentioned some of the stuff while it was developing, basically, you know, banning people of color from even taking the test for a long time. But black and Hispanic Americans are still very underrepresented in the field of law.

And, you know, that's a problem because when you're a practicing attorney, like a lot of opinion, that's why they call them opinions and judgment goes into it. And sure, it's based on precedent, but your perspective is important, and having diverse perspectives is also important. Right. Yeah, for sure. It's a white male profession, essentially, statistically speaking, that is far and away the largest population represented in the legal profession in the United States.

And there's statistics and figures that kind of show the disparity here. There's some data from 2021 from the American Bar Association. that showed that white law school graduates passed on their first try at the bar exam at a rate 24% higher than black students, 13% higher than Hispanic students, and 15% higher than Native Americans. So these are really substantial disparities in passing the bar the first time. And so being in the hot seat, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is like, hey, hey, hey, everybody mellow out here. this is a this is this tracks with other scoring of um racial disparities uh like like law school grades lsac grades like this is in line with them just leave the bar exam alone and by the way

their interpretation is that this is an example of longstanding systemic racial disparities in the american education system right that start way back long before the somebody gets to law school and goes to take the bar, and the bar exam is just showing this. It's just reflecting this problem elsewhere. So again, stop looking at the bar is essentially what the NCBE says. It also kind of sounds like we're just a part of the grand history of systemic discrimination throughout our country. Well, that's the critique of them, too.

People are like, that's your answer? Like, we're just perpetuating an already existing racial disparity. Like, that's essentially what they're saying in that argument. Yeah, it's definitely a strange argument. Other people say that, you know, just part of that disparity is, you know, the cost associated with law school and to be a successful candidate. And like we said, the privilege that it takes to maybe be able to pay for that and then take off months' work and pay for the very best preparatory courses, you know, You know, that's just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know. Right.

I saw that black and Hispanic students who take the bar exam are 50% likelyer to work during their bar prep period than a white student. Like, it's just logistically speaking, racially speaking, it's just much likelier that a white test taker is going to be able to not work and just dedicate their time to prepping for the bar. And, I mean, that alone explains a lot of it because the bar exam is essentially, like, it's a standardized test where you memorize essentially year one law school stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the other critiques is that, you know, it's a memorization test. And there have been plenty of studies that show that it doesn't necessarily, isn't a marker toward your, future performance as an attorney or how successful you may be. Right. There was a study in 2024 from Nevada that compared scores on the MBE and other

components of their test of, I think, a little more than 500 new attorneys and how they were basically rated, how affected they were by their peers and their supervisors and judges. And they did find a small positive relationship between some of the ratings, some parts of the bar, but at the end of the day, overall, they said it was minimally predictive of career success and negligibly related. The Nevada performance test was negligibly related to success. Yeah, those low correlations were as low as one to four percent. I think four percent was the highest. As far as the actual whole bar exam relating to these ratings of how effective these lawyers were by their peers, they said, we can only account for that.

with 12% of the bar exam. The other, the rest of the distinctions or the differences in effectiveness has nothing to do with their score on the bar exam. And so people say like, well, what the heck is the bar exam doing? And again, the national conference of bar examiners are like, we're testing for lawyer competence to protect the public dummy. And people say, well, how are you testing for legal competence? Yeah.

Like what is legal competence? And this is where the National Conference of Board examiners like pull their shirt away from their necks and you can see like some sweat breaking out on their forehead because they've never given a definition of competence. And if you don't have a definition of competence, how can you, in a standardized way, test people for whether they meet that definition or not?

Yeah. So people say like the bar exam under that description is by definition invalid. It's not a valid. valid test, meaning that it doesn't test the thing it purports to test because we just have no idea what it is testing. You know what you just sounded like? What?

An attorney. It sounds like you just dropped the mic in court and then sat down. And I was to your, just sat down on your left, and I put my hand on your shoulder and was like, hell yeah, man. Got him. There have also been a lot of just sort of disasters in recent years, very public ones in terms of the bar. During COVID, they offered remote exams, and it was just sort of a joke in a lot of cases. They were a lot of computer problems like programs crashing. They had facial recognition

issues, and that sometimes they failed to identify dark skin test takers. So that's bad right off the bat. You also, again, you know, it was remote, so you had to keep your eyes on the screen at all times, or they would think you're cheating if you're looking around or looking into your lap or something. So people were like literally urinating themselves in their seat because they couldn't move. And one woman went into labor and went through the test and gave birth and then came home and finished the second day. Yeah. If you want to know how tough Loyola University law students are, there you go. What about California with the chat GPT questions? This one, it's got a a schadenfreude around it, but California said nuts to the UBE, we can do a better program ourselves

and save money. So they designed their own bar exam, like just completely issued the uniform bar examination, right? And it just, the rollout was horrible. There were people who were taking the test. They would get error messages. The program would crash during the test. It wouldn't save their essays. Can you imagine finishing an essay? Like you to save it, and they're like, nope, sorry, do it again. That's every student's nightmare. Yeah, and remember, this is time. Like, you have three hours per segment, right?

Like, if you don't finish in time, sorry, like, you have to stop. So that's a huge part of it. And then also, like you said, chat GPT, it turned out was involved because some students were like, they're like, are misspellings and typos in some of these multiple choice questions. And the California State Bar said, wait, what? Yeah, it turns out that some of those questions were chat, gpt written by chat gpt they weren't even reviewed by a lawyer or copy edited by the state agency that oversaw the test because you know i don't know money i guess and this was another case of lawyers

suing lawyers and lawyers suing their state bar and all that and like California has just lost so much money on it remember this is a money saving thing too so right again there's like a little bit Schadenfreude, too. Yeah, and there was one incident in New York where someone went into cardiac arrest while taking the test. That was this year in the July test. And, you know, people are like, you know, we should help here, right? And the test proctors were like, no, everyone be quiet. And like, you know, just keep taking your test. And we'll deal with this in the next lunch break. Yeah. Like, they had to keep taking their tests while the paramedics were saving this person's life, like next to them, essentially. That was what they were forced to do. That's how.

So, I don't know. You choose your own word. They are about assigning these tests or carrying out these tests. I was working a TV commercial one time as a PA years ago out in the desert in California. And a crew member had a cardiac arrest. And the director told them to move a big fake rock in front of, I mean, they were tending to the guy. But they were like, we need to keep shooting. Like, go move that big fake rock in front of the paramedic so we can keep shooting.

I guess it's better than the director being like, take that fake rock and finish them off with it. Yeah, yeah. And then drag them out of the way. One thing I wondered, because I always kind of wonder, like, how would we do if we took the SAT now, like, you know, at the stage in life or something? I wondered about, like, a really experienced attorney years later if they took the bar again. And Livia dug into that and found a study from 2021. 16, like, successful experience practicing attorneys from Oklahoma re-took the bar, essentially, with no prep. It was just like, you know, their prep was their career on the theory that, hey, if it's measuring ability, then this should bear out in the grades.

And none of them passed. They got scores ranging from 26 to 52 percent, so nobody would have passed that bar. And the lawyers who have been practicing longest did the worst out of all. of them. And then one general criticism of the bar exam, too, in addition to everything else we've just talked about, is that it doesn't in any real way kind of jive with what these lawyers are going to do in the legal profession. It's general questions about law generally in the United States. Again, it's essentially the stuff you learn in your first year at law school because the next two years you start to get into your specialization.

and it's a lot of memory and memorization. And a lot of lawyering after you graduate and go through the bar and become an attorney is open book research to figure out what law applies. Exactly. The bar exam is closed book rapid fire testing. So they're like this is not like even putting away everything else, all the other arguments, at its base, it's kind of a flawed test to start with. Yeah, for sure. Because of that, there are a lot of jurisdictions that have long had workarounds in alternatives, and there are changes on the horizon for the bar itself.

Wisconsin, it's the only state, I guess only jurisdiction, that never stopped saying, hey, you went to law school, and you can practice law in this state. You don't have to take the bar here, which is pretty cool. I think you have to graduate from one of the state's two law schools there, and they call it diploma privilege. I think in the past couple of decades, New Hampshire has followed suit a little bit. And if you graduate with honors from University of New Hampshire Law School and you participate in court simulations and have practical experience, then you can be admitted to practice law without the bar. Yeah, and we had said earlier that the law school was originally created as an alternative to apprenticeship.

Some states have gone the other way now where apprenticeships are alternatives to law school. Like, it's a path to the bar. I like it, too. Vermont and Virginia, they allow apprenticeships instead of, actually, instead of the bar exams themselves, Oregon offers apprenticeships where if you're a law school graduate, you can become a lawyer without the bar exam. If you apprentice for, I think, 675 hours over four weeks in supervised work, you will basically become a lawyer after that. Four weeks? Four months? No, four weeks. Four years? No, I was joking. There's only 675 hours in four weeks. So I would be doing 24 hours a day for a month as an apprentice, which seems hardcore. I'll assume your math checks out. It does. I even used a calculator. Oh, great. I think Washington State has a plan coming in 2026. So more states are kind of getting on board with this.

California last year actually rejected a proposal to become more like Oregon with those apprenticeship hours, even though the state bar of California's board of trustees said we think this is a good idea. The state Supreme Court said no, no, no. But coming around the corner now, we have the next-gen bar exam, right? Yeah, the NCBE is like everybody settled down. So starting in 2018, they're like, we're going to change this a little bit. The test is going to be shorter. We're going to make it so it's possible to take it remote.

if need be, and then it's just going to be a little different where I think it's a little more essay heavy than the original test, but they're also carving out some stuff that they're not going to test on like family law and that kind of thing. So it's a little leaner, meaner kind of bar exam that they're coming up with. All right. Two things that I saw that are worth mentioning real quick. If you do away with the bar exam, there's a couple of benefits to that. One is, is that it puts the onus on law schools themselves to graduate competent lawyers. Right now, there are some law schools that are considered diploma mills. Because as long as 75% of your graduates pass the bar within two years,

like you stay accredited, and you can make a lot of money off that other 25%. That's one thing that would happen. Another one is that legal fees would probably come down. because one of the functions of gatekeeping that the bar exam does is it artificially keeps the supply of lawyers low, which artificially inflates the fees associated with lawyers, too. Uh-huh. Pretty neat. You think about that. Yeah.

Yeah. I spoke to my friend. I think I know a few attorneys here and there, but only like one good friend who's a lawyer who is electing to remain anonymous in this case. Okay. But I did text him kind of about all this, and he said, I would say it's only useful in that it shows how you can collect and synthesize a lot of information under time pressure, but that's not really much different than most standardized test. But as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner, yeah, not so much. He says, for example, the bar will test you to some extent on the rules of civil procedure, but passing the bar doesn't mean you can walk into a deposition the day after you pass and know how to do that. As someone who's taken hundreds of depositions,

you learn by watching, listening to more experienced attorneys do it, and then by trial and error, no pun intended, doing it yourself. He is in favor of the apprenticeships. He said it's probably a lot more helpful, as long as your mentor, you know, knew what they were doing. And then said one thing he would like to see change is, like, I think more emphasis on writing. He said, as he's so many briefs written by someone who allegedly pass a bar, they're just horrible.

He said, that's probably just a criticism of the legal education more than the bar. And then he said he wanted to remain anonymous. And he said, I know it sounds silly or overly cautious when there are SCOTUS justices who can accept luxury vacations with impunity. But I'm supposed to be impartial here, so ragging on the bar might not be a good look. I think that's smart. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

Thanks for tapping your anonymous friend. That was good info. Sure. If you wanted to learn more about the bar exam, go take the bar exam. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail. That'd be kind of fun. I mean, if it was free, I would take the bar exam just to, like, with zero knowledge of anything, just to see, like, how poorly I would do.

Yeah, I would, too. I'd be right next to you, peeing in my seat and going into labor and having a heart attack. Wouldn't that be funny, though, if we got, like, I don't know, even like a 20% or something? Or if we passed and we just automatically became lawyers? Yeah, let's do it. All right. All right, this is about the Salton Sea. You called for listener mail, right?

Mm-hmm. All right, hey, guys, I was listening to the Salt and Sea episode. In college, I took an ocean geography class and learned about inland seas. An inland sea, because remember, we sort of wondered a difference between seas and lakes. He said, an inland sea can either be entirely landlocked or have a single river connected. to the ocean. Inland seas are larger than lakes and have a salinity between a lake and an ocean. So I think you've mentioned something about salinity. There are typically remnants of larger oceans and have numerous islands, but of course the scientific community names these things.

And sometimes it can be rather confusing. The Caspian Sea, for example, is classified as a lake, despite being known as the largest inland sea in the world. And the Hudson Bay is an island sea. Or, which is, did you know that? An island sea or inland sea? Well, he says island, but probably meant inland. Okay. I didn't know.

I had no idea. Whether it's an island sea or an inland sea, I had no idea. Or Dylan's favorite sea is the Lerapintine Sea or the Lerapentine Sea. It's an ancient sea that split Australia and half during the Cambrian explosion. being a long time listener and learning about new things is the best part of my commute, guys. That is from Dylan.

Thanks a lot, Dylan. That was great info. I still like your interpretation, Chuck, which if I remember correctly, you were saying that an inland, a lake would be landlocked, I think? Yeah. I mean, it sounds like there's no true definition.

I don't know. Well, then let's keep going with yours. Great. Nice try, Dylan. If you want to be like Dylan and send us a great email, you can send it off to, stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, the tray to my Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby and why he chose not to return to it just like that.

You listen to Are You a Charlotte on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What were some of the memories from your USO tours? That nobody knew who I was and they were like, why do we have to say hello to this guy? Recently on the Good Stuff podcast, we sat down with our friend Bradley Cooper to talk about his deep friendship with host Jacob. He was there when I found

out that I was going to have a baby. And how they've been there for each other through the hard times. And I was able to sort of walk Jacob through some stuff. I leaned on you real heavy. I think times that you knew and times you didn't know. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey, it's Eric Andre. You won't believe what happened on the latest episode of bombing with Eric Andre. First time I tried to land 900, I fell forward, broke my rib, and I was late to pick up my son at preschool. Wow. Our latest episode features Tony Hawk, RICO Nasty, Yamanika Saunders, and Derek Beckles.

Listen to bombing with Eric Andre on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Bombing, bombing with Eric Andre. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.