Are Faculty Members Enthusiastic About Preparing for the NextGen Bar Exam?
In previous blog posts, I have outlined a three-step process for NextGen Bar Exam readiness: (1) assess, (2) discuss, and (3) prepare. In terms of assessing your students’ current state of readiness, I talked about designing tools to measure student competencies related to NextGen knowledge and skills, and about the virtues of curriculum mapping. Now, I want to discuss how to get faculty talking about NextGen readiness.
Student engagement is thought of as the elusive white whale of legal education, but faculty engagement is equally enigmatic. Faculty members have teaching, scholarship, and service responsibilities that keep them thoroughly occupied, and it is difficult to find the bandwidth sometimes to pull back and talk about the big picture of curricular or pedagogical innovation.
Any effort to prepare students for the NextGen Bar Exam must stem from a discussion among the entire faculty about (1) what work is required and (2) who is going to perform that work. Faculty buy-in is critically important yet difficult to engender.
During our recent webinar, I polled the audience about the levels of faculty enthusiasm at their schools for helping prepare students for NextGen. Less than 5% of respondents said that their faculty was “very enthusiastic.” Around 25% said that their faculty was “somewhat enthusiastic,” and a disheartening 45% reported that their faculty was “not enthusiastic at all.” Long story short, this dynamic has to change if schools want to succeed in the NextGen era. Why? This goes back to the ways in which NextGen is different than the Uniform Bar Exam and other legacy bar exams. In law school, students are frequently assessed with multiple-choice questions and issue-spotter essay questions based on provided fact patterns and rules of law that students have memorized (or condensed into an outline for an open-book exam). This comports with the form of assessment on the UBE and most legacy bar exams.
By contrast, on NextGen, 60% of the exam will require students to read and digest primary legal and factual sources and draft attorney work product (memos, client letters, briefs, etc.). The majority of students will not have had repeated exposure to this form of assessment during law school, and a fundamental reorientation to how they are tested is not something students can pick up in a final-semester bar prep class or over the course of summer bar study.
Rather, students need to be learning and practicing basic lawyering skills throughout their time in law school; skills instruction — of a type — needs to pervade the doctrinal curriculum. I say “of a type” because these skills need to be presented in a basic and generic fashion — in other words, in a manner similar to how they are tested on the bar exam, as opposed to the more nuanced and specific fashion in which they are encountered in clinics and simulation courses.
So, faculty buy-in is critical and elusive. What is the solution? I’ll focus on that question in my next blog.
