(I’m American and am aware that different states have different tests).
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In ELI5 terms, the bar exam is hard to pass because it is a hard test. In most states it is a two day grind, which is hard. If you do not pass you will not be able to do the job you literally have spent the last three years (and probably a lot of money) working toward, so the stress is very hard. And all of that is before you actually get into the fact that you need to be able to remember just about everything you learned in law school.
Some law schools will prepare you better than others. Most reputable law schools will tell you the pass/fail statistics for graduates.
Also, you didn’t ask, but there is also some variety between the states. California’s bar exam is notoriously hard.
The bar exam is a closed book test on several areas of the law, which is just an immense amount of knowledge. Actual lawyers typically only work in one or two areas of law and still have to research everything because it’s just too much to know.
Law school kind of prepares you for the bar exam. Everyone is required to take the same classes in the first year and those classes are all on the bar. There are other classes that are covered on the bar and you can choose to take them over the next two years. Some schools really want to help prepare you to pass, but some schools think they’re too good for that and others are just out to get your money. Most people rely on test prep companies and spend a couple months studying. It’s kind of like cramming for a mega-final for all the classes you took three years ago plus some extra classes you never actually took. It’s really hard.
The test is usually two days. I know Texas does three. One day is multiple choice, which sounds chill but I guarantee you it isn’t. The other day is writing. You just sit at your laptop and tippity-tap all day in a giant room full of people who are just as stressed out as you are and try to remember all the stupid little rules you learned.
Then when you’re done, you have all this useless information in your head that never came up on the test and will never come up in your practice, but it’s there forever. And things you knew cold before you started studying? Gone. They were gone when you needed then on the test, and they’re gone forever, no matter how often you look them up.
Think of it this way.
Your average college test is 1 to 1.5 hours. Law school is about the same. Each test is one topic. If you schedule it right, you have 3 to 5 days between tests so you can keep one topic in your head at any given moment. Once you’re done, you get to rest and prepare for the next one. Purge the old, cram the impending.
The bar is 2 or 3 days of testing, usually 2 blocks of 3.5 hours with a lunch break. You have to know 7 or 8 topics well enough to answer hundreds of questions and write essays analyzing multiple issues. You get done at 4, eat, rest, and then you’re at it again. No time to purge because you don’t know what order they will come and just not enough time.
It’s not hard but you need to be physically and mentally ready for the grind.
Law school doesn’t prepare you for the bar. It’s there to teach you how you don’t know anything and to support all your assertions and analysis before you arrive at a conclusion.
You pay Barbri to prepare you for the bar.
States have different exams ‘kind of’ all use the same multiple choice portion, but some states do their own essay portion (for example PA has theirs and includes tax) The exam itself is 2 days making up 4 3 hour blocks.
1 block is purely on writing. It uses fictitious law and you are given a task ‘write a memo to the zoning board explaining whether the basketball court can be built as planned’ is a fair question, you will get 3-4 ‘sources’ like the local zoning ordinance, and 2 fictitious cases where the law is WRONG intentionally. If it is a DUI case the legal limit for BAC will be .10 because it is to catch someone not reading.
1 block is real law questions writing and you have to answer all of the questions. The entire time you’ve spent learning about estates was a single 3 hour lecture? Oh well hope you remember the law or can make it up good enough.
the last 2 are 100 multiple choice questions (each) and require you to know very specialized aspects of law and ‘why’. Should the evidence from the traffic stop be excluded? Yes because it is a Brady violation (every one knows it is a case…involving criminal law and evidence so it sounds like a ‘good’ answer but it applies only to the prosecution not turning over evidence to the Defense) Yes because it is a violation of the Defendant’s fourth amendment rights (4,5, and 6 are all very similar but apply at different times – it also has absolutely nothing to do with the prompt, again to punish someone whose rushing and skimmed the question) yes because the officer didn’t have probable cause to search the vehicle (this could actually be the right answer depending on the prompt) or No.
between the exam itself being difficult and the exam conditions- you basically take the exam in a massively sterilized environment with everyone else taking it in the same room, possibly in a city you’ve never been in after staying in a trashy hotel…with everyone else taking the exam
‘how well does law school prepare’ …it depends. You can take the mandatory classes then whatever you want no matter how useless for the bar exam, or you can take straight bar prep courses. Either way you are going to need a commercial law course which is made solely to pass the bar. It isn’t ‘fun’ and requires you to commit to 8+ hour days studying for months. Honestly, I think someone who sat through 1 semester of law school then spent the rest of their first year studying for the exam would be FAR better off than someone who even took straight bar courses at school then took the exam
I will speak from my perspective as a Canadian who studied at U of T law.
Law school is basically 100% irrelevant to the bar exam. Actually I’d go further and say that law school is 95% irrelevant to being a lawyer. Most of law school consists in studying case law and the evolution of precedent. What matters is the current state of the law. You can fast forward to studying the law at present without going through all the historical evolution. (I am confident that anyone capable of getting into law school could pass all their classes without going to a single lecture, so long as they had a two page study sheet of the law for each class, and they practiced writing a couple arguments.) But if law school was truncated they (a) couldn’t justify the cost of the program, and (b) couldn’t pretend that lawyers and judges have some kind of special qualification, even though they are just people arguing about stuff.
The bar exam is basically a hazing that tests your ability to memorize and locate legal information. Not only is law school irrelevant to the bar, the bar is mostly irrelevant to legal work. Whenever you have a case in front of you you are going to be looking stuff up anyway. It would be negligent to rely strictly on your memorization ability. And the information you are required to know for the bar is unlikely to be what you are doing in practice.
The bar exam, as a hazing/induction ritual, is also another means by which the legal community convinces themselves and others that they are a special class of person uniquely qualified on legal matters. Other means include using specialized language and Latin for no reason (there is in law a doctrine of “res ipsa loquitur” which is the Latin way of saying “duh, obviously”–but that doesn’t sound professional enough, so they need to cloak it in Latin), wearing special clothes and having their own heightened etiquette, having judges wear ridiculous robes and sit on a raised platform, etc.
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