In re Florida Board of Bar Examiners

397 So. 2d 590, 1980 Fla. LEXIS 4464
CourtSupreme Court of Florida
DecidedNovember 20, 1980
DocketNo. 59880
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 397 So. 2d 590 (In re Florida Board of Bar Examiners) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Florida primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re Florida Board of Bar Examiners, 397 So. 2d 590, 1980 Fla. LEXIS 4464 (Fla. 1980).

Opinion

PER CURIAM.

The Florida Board of Bar Examiners has filed a petition to amend the rules of the Supreme Court relating to admissions to the Bar. These proposed rule changes include a single compilation of rules to be adopted by the Court, eliminating the distinction between the rules adopted by the Court entitled “Rules of the Supreme Court Relating to Admissions to the Bar” and the rules adopted by the Board entitled “Rules and Regulations of The Florida Board of Bar Examiners.”

This Court invites comment by all interested persons directed to these proposed amendments. These comments and any request for oral argument must be filed in the Supreme Court no later than January 15, 1981. Oral argument is scheduled for Monday, February 9, 1981. The petition and the proposed amendments are appended to this order. The appendix filed by the Board and referred to in its petition, which explains the proposed rule changes in more detail, is available for review in the clerk’s office of the Supreme Court.

It is so ordered.

SUNDBERG, C. J., and ADKINS, BOYD, OVERTON, ENGLAND, ALDERMAN and McDONALD, JJ., concur.

APPENDIX

COMES NOW the Florida Board of Bar Examiners (hereinafter referred to as the “Board”), by and through its undersigned attorney, and petitions this Court for approval of certain amendments to the Rules of the Supreme Court of Florida Relating to Admissions to the Bar, and in support thereof, says:

1. The Board has been engaged in an ongoing review of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Florida Relating to Admissions to the Bar in an effort to provide clarity and uniformity, and to assist the Board in the efficient admission of all qualified applicants with dispatch.

2. Article II, Section 10 of the Rules (hereinafter referred to as the “10/20 Rule”) currently provides the basis upon which examination papers are graded. The grades received by the top 10% of those examined in each part of the examination are added, and the total is divided by the number of examinees comprising the top 10% in that part. Those examinees who receive a grade above or within twenty points below such result are credited with a passing score.

3. Recent statistical studies have shown there are four aspects of the current bar examination procedures that may result in erroneous pass/fail decisions on individual applicants. These potential problem areas are summarized below. A more complete discussion of these problems is presented in composite Exhibit A.

A. Within a given essay question in Part I, a particular issue may have a much greater or lesser influence on determining an applicant’s standing relative to other applicants than is indicated by the number of points assigned to that issue.

B. Within Part I of the examination, the six components (four essay questions plus two machine-scored sections) are not weighted equally in terms of their influence in determining an applicant’s relative standing on this part of the examination.

C. The three parts of the examination are not equally difficult to pass. Thus, one part carries more weight in determining an applicant’s pass/fail status than does some other part. [591]*591Moreover, the relative importance of a given part varies across administrations and is easily influenced by extraneous factors.

D. The quality of performance required for passing a given part of the examination can vary across administration of it; i. e., it may be harder to pass a given part of the examination on one administration than it is on another. This is due to the failure of the 10/20 rule to adequately correct for differences in test difficulty across administrations.

The linchpin of the existing system for setting the pass/fail line on a part is the 10/20 rule provided in Article II, Section 10. This rule determines an applicant’s pass/fail status on each part in terms of how well that applicant performed relative to the performance of other applicants who took that part at the same time. The foregoing problems arise primarily because this rule does not fully adjust for differences across administrations in the difficulty of the questions asked, the leniency of readers for Part I, or the ability level of the applicants taking the test. The 10/20 rule also tends to ignore inequities across administrations that may arise due to differences in the shape of the distribution of scores, the degree to which scores spread out from the average score, and the presence of atypically high or low scores in the top 10 percent.

4.The proposed Rules provide for the use of recognized statistical procedures which when applied to the examination assure equal weighting of essay questions on Part A (formerly Part I) and a consistent standard for determination of minimum technical competence from exam to exam.

Article VI, Section 7 of the proposed Rules implements the new statistical method prepared by the Board’s consultant. The recommended pass/fail line for the General Bar Examination (Parts A and B) is 133. Please see Exhibits Al and A2 which refer to the many statistical studies run on multiple administrations which were utilized to fix the historical basis for this recommendation. Statistical data for the MPRE is limited by reason of the fact that it has only been administered twice in 1980. A study of that which is available led the Board to recommend a scaled score of 70. It should be noted scaled MPRE scores range from a low of 50 to a maximum of 150 based on a 50-item, two-hour examination. The selected score would pass 91% of the 4,208 persons sitting nationally in March of 1980. Please see Exhibits A3 and A4.

5. Applicants may under the proposed Rules submit to either of two methods for passing the General Bar Examination. While it is anticipated that for most applicants it will be more difficult for them to pass the examination with the multiple cutoff method, it also may be easier for some because of the limitation of areas examined on each part compared to the compensatory method. The multiple cut-off method also preserves the present procedure for utilizing MBE scores attained in other jurisdictions. Please see Article VI, Section 6 of the proposed Rules.

6. Current Rules provide for Part I (Florida) and Part III (Professional Responsibility) of the Florida Bar Examination to be administered four times each year, with Part II (Multistate Bar Examination) administered simultaneously with the other parts twice each year. The proposed Rules provide for a reduction in the number of administrations of the “Florida” (Part I) examination to coincide with the administration of the Multistate Bar Examination (Part II) given twice each year. A separate Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination administered three times annually by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and its designee will replace the present Board-developed Professional Responsibility examination. The Board anticipates a greater number of examinees submitting to the General Bar Examination as a result of the reduction in the number of examination administrations.

7. Article VI, Section 7 of the proposed Rules provides for the use of multiple calibrated readers for the grading of essay answers. The recommendation to use multiple readers per question was based on sev[592]*592eral considerations. First, research on examinations in other jurisdictions has indicated that a given reader is only slightly more consistent with himself (or herself) than that reader is with some other reader.

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