Why Should You Care About the Bar Exam?
You didn’t take the bar exam. That’s probably because you didn’t go to law school. Good for you. Law school is hard. Your first year is an elaborate hazing ritual in which we law professors pull out your brain and put it back in upside down. We make you read hundreds of pages every week while looking for summer jobs and shoring up extra-curriculars for your résumé. Most classes base your grade on one all-or-nothing exam at the end of the semester. By the end of the third year, you are a different person: You have learned a new language, new ways to shake hands, new ways to dress, new methods of killing and being killed.
But you did all that, and you didn’t crack. You made it through high school with good enough grades in your classes and on the SAT to get into college. You made it through college with good enough grades in your classes and on the LSAT to get into law school. You made it through law school with good enough grades on exam after exam to graduate. And you paid for it all.
All that was even harder to do if you had to work a full-time job between classes during the day, put your kids to bed, and then spend all night parsing 2000-word paragraphs written by Englishmen in the 19th century. Or if you were a first-generation college graduate, stuck with the additional homework of learning the culture and habits of the professional class.
