> The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just for effort, or financial expenditure.
(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-off is too high, giving many false negatives, and that is an argument that appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)
> I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
The fact that this process is incredibly wasteful seems relevant to the argument, no? If you took the bar exam after spending twenty minutes and fifty bucks, it wouldn't really matter that it didn't provide any more information on the testees than their LSAT scores had already provided.
> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted:
> But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut.
If there is a bar exam, then when it is taken is, I think, exactly the right time to make the cut.
Even with those sentences quoted as context, I still think that the time and money spent in the study of law is irrelevant to whether someone should be accredited, by whatever process. (That doesn't mean that I think that it is irrelevant full stop; I agree that it is deeply relevant to the student, and probably to society as a whole.) Nonetheless, I meant in my original post to argue literally only with the one sentence that I quoted, which is why I did not give the context, and not to argue with the rest of the post, which seemed eminently sound and which I agree should probably be interpreted as you have done.
> That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted
It is the position of the sentence I quoted, as you can see by following my quotation all the way through to:
>> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
It seems like there might be a confusion over the concepts "bar exam", meaning "any exam that allows or prohibits the practice of law by a testee", and "bar exam", meaning "the test given to law school graduates who wish to practice law, under the American legal education system".
A bar exam in the first sense makes the cut by definition -- it is the cut, and therefore the cut cannot be made at any other time. But the bar exam in the first sense does not occur at any particular time. rhino369 has made a perfectly coherent argument that the bar exam in the second sense, the real bar exam as it occurs in American practice, which is given at a particular time, is given at the wrong time, that it should be given before students go to law school and in fact should really just be replaced by the LSAT (already given at the appropriate time) because it isn't informative taken in addition to the LSAT anyway.
The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just for effort, or financial expenditure.
(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-off is too high, giving many false negatives, and that is an argument that appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)