AP EXAMS 2010

[TinCow]

And that's why the question was legendary. An entire generation year of children denied their dreams just because we were off by one year.

Sounds a lot like the Summer 2003 Virginia State Bar Exam.

After graduating law school, all law students must pass the Bar to be able to practice law. The difficulty varies by state, but generally there are two parts: a standard federal multiple-choice portion which is the same in every state (except Louisiana) and a state-specific essay portion (some states also have a third 'practicum' portion). Each portion takes a full day. The test is only offered twice per year (Summer and Winter), and without it you cannot work as an attorney... so passing is extremely important. Fail, and you have to wait another 6 months before you can even make another attempt... and good luck with employment until then. There are an extremely large number of 'types' of law, such as Family Law, Patent Law, Property Law, etc. Some are relatively obscure, and some are extremely common. Nearly all law students take Bar Prep classes, particularly BarBri. BarBri actually holds about an 80 to 90% market share on Bar Prep courses, and since about 85% of all law students take Bar Prep courses, what BarBri teaches becomes gospel.

The three most common areas of law on Bar Exams are Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Civil Procedure. Major questions on those appear every single year, often multiple questions. The Virginia Bar Exam has only 9 essay questions, and typically those three topics account for about 2.5 of the questions, sometimes more, so BarBri devotes a lot of time (weeks) to teaching those topics. By contrast, at the time I graduated law school, Commercial Paper and Secured Transactions had each only appeared on the Bar one time in the past 20 years. So, BarBri devoted almost no time (maybe 1 day) to teaching them and actually told people that they could skip over them if they were short on time.

The Summer 2003 Virginia State Bar Exam destroyed people. There were NO questions on Criminal Law or Criminal Procedure, and only half a question on Civil Procedure. At the same time, there was one full question on Commercial Paper and half a question on Secured Transactions (or vice versa, I can't remember exactly anymore). So, the stuff everyone had studied wasn't even asked, and the stuff no one had studied accounted for nearly 20% of the essay score. There was much anguish, and the failure rate jumped by a good 10 to 15%. It was a bad year for a lot of people. Fortunately, three days before the exam, Scienter and I decided that, even though we had been advised not to bother with Commercial Paper and Secured Transactions, we would study them anyway 'just in case.' So, we passed without any problems.