A few days ago, I took the Bar Exam.

To prepare for it, I stopped working for almost three months. Studying became my full-time job. I memorized hundreds of legal rules, answered thousands of multiple-choice questions, and practiced writing legal arguments under extreme time pressure.

I still do not know my result. I may have passed. I may have to go through the entire process again.

But my individual score will not change what the experience made clear: the Bar Exam does not test everyone under equal conditions.

I was able to stop working temporarily. Thousands of graduates cannot. They have rent to pay, children or relatives to support, health insurance to maintain, and looming student loans. They prepare late at night, on weekends, or after spending eight hours at work.

Others can study ten hours a day because their families support them or because a large law firm pays for their preparation and delays their starting date until after the exam.

On test day, everyone receives the same questions.

But they do not arrive having had the same time, money, housing, health, or freedom from work.

That is the false equality at the center of the Bar Exam.

Two Days to Decide Who Can Practice Law

For most law graduates in the United States, completing law school is not enough to practice. They must also pass a licensing examination administered under the authority of the jurisdiction where they seek admission.

The version I took, the legacy Uniform Bar Examination still used in many jurisdictions, lasts two days and has three parts.

The Multistate Performance Test, or MPT, contains two 90-minute assignments. Examinees receive a fictional file and legal library and must prepare something resembling a professional legal document.

The Multistate Essay Examination, or MEE, contains six essays. Examinees have 30 minutes for each one to identify the issues, remember the relevant legal rules, and apply them to the facts.

The Multistate Bar Examination, or MBE, consists of 200 multiple-choice questions completed over six hours. It accounts for 50 percent of the final score. The essays account for 30 percent and the performance tests only 20 percent.

Half of the score that determines whether someone may practice law therefore depends on answering multiple-choice questions at an average pace of less than two minutes per question.

During the exam, you cannot research a rule, confirm whether the law has changed, consult a colleague, ask the person you represent a follow-up question, or consult outside legal sources.

In other words, you cannot do many of the things a responsible lawyer should do before giving an answer that could affect someone’s freedom, employment, housing, family, or immigration status.

The exam measures memory, speed, test-taking strategy, and the ability to perform under pressure. Those abilities may have some relationship to legal practice. But they are only a small part of what makes someone capable of defending another person’s rights.

The Official Answer: “Protecting the Public”

The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which develops the national components of the test, says the purpose of the Bar Exam is to protect the public by ensuring that newly licensed lawyers possess the minimum knowledge and skills required for entry-level practice.

Protecting the public sounds like an argument above politics.

Who could oppose protecting people from an unprepared or negligent lawyer?

But “the public” is not an abstract category. It includes workers facing retaliation or wage theft. Families threatened with eviction. Immigrants fighting deportation. Women seeking protection from abuse. Protesters facing criminal charges. People imprisoned by a racist criminal legal system.

If protecting them is truly the goal, we should ask more than whether a graduate can memorize enough rules to pass a two-day exam.

We should ask what kind of lawyers the system trains, whose interests they defend, and whether ordinary people can obtain legal representation at all.

The law declares that everyone is equal. A landlord and a tenant may enter the same courthouse. A corporation and a dismissed worker may invoke the same procedural rules. A wealthy employer and an employee may each be entitled to hire counsel.

But that formal equality hides an obvious material inequality.

One side may have money, time, institutional power, and a team of lawyers. The other may be unable to afford a single consultation.

The Bar Exam reproduces the same contradiction. It gives every examinee the same questions while ignoring the radically different conditions under which they prepare.

What Role Do Laws Schools Play?

The traditional route to becoming a lawyer in the United States already requires years of education. Students normally complete an undergraduate degree before entering a Juris Doctor program, which usually requires another three years of full-time study.

During law school, they take doctrinal courses, write legal arguments, conduct research, sit for examinations, study professional responsibility, and sometimes participate in clinics or supervised practice.

The American Bar Association’s accreditation standards require law schools to establish learning outcomes involving legal knowledge, analysis, research, communication, ethics, and professional skills. Schools must also assess whether students are meeting those outcomes.

Why, then, does graduation not demonstrate even minimum competence?

If the authorities do not trust accredited law schools to prepare competent graduates, that is not simply a reason to add another exam. It is an indictment of a legal education system built around high tuition, debt, and exclusion.

Stronger clinics and supervised practice are necessary, but they are not enough. A radical and necessary change would be the creation of tuition-free public law schools, open to working-class students and accountable to the communities they serve. Legal education should be treated as a public good, not as a commodity available mainly to those who can afford years of tuition or assume six-figure debt.

Instead, law schools are allowed to charge enormous sums for legal education and then transfer the final risk to the individual graduate. After years of study, the message is still: your degree is not enough. Pay again. Stop working if you can. Buy a commercial preparation course. Memorize everything again. Then prove that you deserve to enter the profession.

A Test of Resources

The direct cost of taking the exam includes registration charges, computer fees, travel, accommodation, background investigations, and commercial preparation programs.

But the largest expense may never appear on a receipt.

It is the salary a graduate loses while studying.

It is the work shift that cannot be abandoned.

It is the cost of child care.

It is the quiet room one person has and another does not.

It is the difference between studying after a full day of work and waking up with no responsibility except preparing for the exam.

An AccessLex study found that employment during the preparation period was negatively associated with Bar Exam success. The research was exploratory and limited to a sample of California examinees, so it cannot prove that working causes failure in every case. But its conclusion is hardly surprising: graduates who can devote more time to studying have an advantage over those who must continue working.

This comes after many graduates have already taken on substantial debt. In an American Bar Association survey, the median law-school debt among respondents who borrowed was $112,500. The median total student debt was $137,500. Some graduates also borrowed specifically to survive the Bar Exam preparation period, with a median “bar loan” of $7,500 among those who took one.

Debt also shapes what happens after admission. Graduates under pressure to repay six-figure loans are pushed toward whichever jobs can pay them, not necessarily toward the places where legal representation is most urgently needed.

First, the system turns legal education into an expensive commodity. Then it imposes another costly barrier before graduates can use that education professionally.

The Bar Exam functions as a class filter even when no individual question mentions class.

The inequality is built into the conditions required to succeed.

Who Is Filtered Out and Who Is Left Undefended?

The power of the Bar Exam rests on a basic assumption: those who score above a particular line are minimally competent, while those who fall below it are not.

That line has enormous consequences. In 2025, jurisdictions reported 67,442 Bar Exam sittings across the United States. Only 42,496 resulted in a passing score; nearly 25,000 did not.

These figures do not represent 25,000 people permanently excluded from the profession. Some were repeat examinees, and many will eventually pass. But every unsuccessful attempt can mean months of lost wages, new registration fees, another commercial preparation course, and more time during which a law graduate cannot practice independently.

For an exam with so much power, surprisingly little research has tested whether its scores actually predict professional effectiveness.

A 2024 study followed 524 lawyers admitted in Nevada between 2014 and 2020, including 84 who had failed the exam on their first attempt. Researchers compared their scores with later evaluations by supervisors, peers, judges, and the lawyers themselves. The relationship between exam performance and professional effectiveness was generally weak, and the positive associations found were usually too small to have practical significance.

The study covered only one state and included only people who eventually passed. Still, it challenges an assumption too often treated as fact: falling a few points below a cut score does not prove that someone is incapable of responsibly defending another person’s rights.

A two-day examination may distinguish between people who performed differently under artificial conditions. That is not the same as reliably distinguishing competent lawyers from incompetent ones.

This matters because the United States does not suffer from an excess of legal representation for working people. It suffers from an enormous shortage.

The Legal Services Corporation estimates that around 50 million people live in households below 125 percent of the federal poverty line. Nearly three-quarters of low-income households experienced at least one civil legal problem in a single year, yet they received no assistance—or insufficient assistance—for 92 percent of the problems that substantially affected their lives.

These problems involved housing, employment, health care, family safety, education, debt, and access to basic income. Legal Services Corporation-funded organizations received requests concerning an estimated 1.9 million legal problems, but lacked the resources to assist with almost half of them.

There is no reliable national estimate of exactly how many lawyers would be needed to meet every unmet legal need. But the available figures reveal the scale of the shortage.

The National Center for Access to Justice counted only 10,479 paid civil legal-aid lawyers nationwide. It proposes a minimum of ten legal-aid attorneys for every 10,000 people living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Twenty-seven states and Puerto Rico had fewer than one.

The comparison is imperfect but revealing: the nearly 25,000 unsuccessful Bar Exam sittings recorded in 2025 were more than twice the entire number of paid civil legal-aid lawyers in the country.

Not every unsuccessful examinee would choose public-interest work, and expanding legal aid would require funding, supervision, and institutional support. Still, the contradiction is impossible to ignore.

The system prevents thousands of legally educated people from practicing through an exam whose ability to predict professional effectiveness remains weakly supported. At the same time, millions face eviction, wage theft, family separation, debt, discrimination, and abuse without anyone available to defend them.

A mechanism that excludes people on this scale should have to prove that its exclusion is necessary. Repeating the phrase “minimum competence” is not proof.

Protecting the public cannot mean only protecting people from an allegedly incompetent lawyer. It must also mean protecting them from having no lawyer at all.

The alternative should not be merely a lower passing score or a redesigned test. Graduates should be allowed to demonstrate competence through supervised legal residencies in legal-aid organizations, unions, housing-defense programs, immigration organizations, and law-school clinics.

They would learn by investigating real problems, preparing arguments, meeting deadlines, appearing in court, and listening to the people they represent. Communities would receive free legal assistance, while residents would earn a salary instead of being required to survive months without one.

This would not eliminate every barrier to justice. But it would begin to replace a system designed to filter people out with one designed to prepare lawyers while bringing them closer to those who most need to be defended.

Protecting the Public or Protecting the Profession?

The Bar Exam was not always considered an inevitable stage of becoming a lawyer.

Historically, many jurisdictions used some form of diploma privilege, allowing graduates of approved law schools to enter the profession without taking a separate standardized test.

Research into the history of licensing has connected the expansion of Bar Exams and the elimination of diploma privilege with efforts by the organized profession to control entry. In some cases, licensing requirements were tied directly to the exclusion of Black graduates and other groups considered undesirable by the legal establishment.

That does not mean every person administering the exam today intends to exclude working-class or racialized graduates.

The problem is larger than individual intentions.

Institutions can reproduce inequality while appearing neutral. A test can present identical questions to everyone and still favor those with greater access to money, time, educational support, and specialized preparation.

The rules governing entry into a profession are never merely technical. They determine who gets in, who must wait, who must pay again, and who is pushed out.

The Bar Exam does not only evaluate individual graduates. It helps preserve the social composition of the legal profession.

What Kind of Lawyers Do We Need?

The legal profession often presents itself as politically neutral. Lawyers are supposedly technicians who learn the rules and apply them without regard to social conflict.

But no lawyer works outside society.

Legal knowledge can be used to defend a company firing workers or the workers organizing against the layoffs. It can be used to evict a family or to defend that family’s home. It can be used to prosecute protesters or to challenge state repression.

The law does not eliminate these conflicts. It gives them a legal form.

That is why competence cannot mean only knowing the rules. We must also ask what responsibilities lawyers have and on whose side they use their knowledge.

Can they listen carefully to the person they represent?

Can they explain the law without hiding behind professional language?

Can they understand why working-class communities distrust the courts?

Can they investigate before answering, recognize an ethical conflict, and stand against institutional pressure?

Can they defend rights when doing so is unpopular?

These questions matter in a country where millions of people cannot obtain meaningful legal assistance. The Legal Services Corporation estimates that low-income Americans receive no legal help, or not enough help, for 92 percent of the civil legal problems that substantially affect their lives.

The Bar Exam is not the sole cause of that crisis. The underfunding of legal aid, the cost of representation, the concentration of lawyers in profitable practice areas, and deep social inequality are all decisive.

But the contradiction remains.

The system claims to protect the public by excluding graduates through a two-day test while millions of people face eviction, wage theft, family separation, discrimination, and abuse without anyone to represent them.

A Public Legal Residency

Criticizing the Bar Exam does not mean that anyone should be allowed to practice without preparation, ethical standards, or supervision.

It means we should find a better way to demonstrate competence.

Graduates could complete a publicly-funded and paid legal residency. For six months or a year, they could work under experienced supervision in legal-aid organizations, public defenders’ offices, unions, law-school clinics, tenant organizations, and groups defending immigrants and other oppressed communities.

The legal assistance would be free for the public. But the residents themselves must be paid by the State.

Replacing the Bar Exam with unpaid work would only substitute one class barrier for another. A person who cannot afford to study without a salary also cannot afford to work for six months without one.

Residents could be evaluated through the work lawyers actually perform: interviewing the people they represent, investigating facts, researching law, drafting motions, negotiating, appearing in court, meeting deadlines, identifying ethical problems, and accepting responsibility for their decisions.

Licensure could depend on a portfolio of work, independent evaluations, and demonstrated professional growth, not a single score produced over two days.

Oregon has already shown that a supervised portfolio pathway can operate. Its Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination requires 675 hours of legal work, written work products, negotiations, documented interactions with people represented, and evaluation by the state’s Board of Bar Examiners. Employers generally must pay participants the same salary and benefits provided to other recent law graduates.

But Oregon’s program is not the public legal residency proposed here. Participants may work for private firms, businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, or solo practitioners. It does not generally require them to provide free legal services to underserved communities. Only a small portion of the program is specifically dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion, or access-to-justice activities.

Washington’s Supreme Court approved several experiential alternatives in principle, including a six-month graduate apprenticeship. Its task force concluded that the traditional exam disproportionately and unnecessarily blocks marginalized groups and is, at best, minimally effective at ensuring competence.

But those alternatives should not yet be described as an operating program. As of 2026, Washington was still developing the necessary rules, and the Bar Exam remained the only available path for most first-time applicants.

These developments prove that a two-day examination is not a law of nature.

But we should go further. A genuine alternative should connect professional training with the unmet legal needs of working people, and it should be publicly funded so that graduates are not forced to choose between serving their communities and surviving.

Passing the Bar Should Not Mean Defending the System

Those of us who pass the Bar Exam will have a particular responsibility.

It will be easy to look back and conclude that the system works because we managed to cross the barrier. It will be easy to assume that those who failed simply did not work hard enough.

That is how exclusionary institutions reproduce themselves. Those who survive the filter turn their personal success into a justification for keeping it.

But passing does not make the exam fair.

It does not prove that those who failed are incompetent.

It does not prove that memorizing hundreds of rules is the best way to protect another person’s rights.

It does not prove that the ability to stop working for three months should be an unspoken requirement for entering the profession.

Lawyers who obtain their licenses should not simply celebrate being admitted into a closed institution. We should ask who remains outside and use our position to change the conditions of entry.

That means fighting for paid public residencies, accessible legal education, expanded legal aid, and multiple fair pathways to licensure.

It also means rejecting the idea that lawyers stand above political and social conflict.

There is no neutral legal practice in a society divided by class, racism, exploitation, and oppression. Every legal argument exists within a struggle over whose rights, property, freedom, and power will be protected.

I still do not know my result. But no score will answer the most important question.

The question is not only who can pass the Bar Exam.

It is what kind of lawyers we want to become and on whose side, we will use the law.

For my part, I do not need an exam to tell me what kind of lawyer I want to be. I want to defend workers against those who exploit them. I do not want to become another professional who simply reproduces this system. I want to use the law to help people understand how the system works, confront its injustices, and ultimately change it at its roots.

I already know where my professional ethics stand: with those who are most exploited and oppressed. That is the side where I will put my knowledge, my work, and my commitment.

If this article speaks to you, leave a comment and help us share it. We need more people questioning who the legal profession serves and fighting to transform it.

The post The Bar Exam Is a Class Filter, Not a Test of Competence appeared first on Left Voice.

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