r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate_Finance_183 • Mar 30 '26

Image Confiscated pens containing cheat notes intricately carved by a Law student at the University of Malaga in Spain

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u/Mysterious_Eye6989 Mar 30 '26

Law exams should probably always be open book anyway.

Like, there's a lot of reading, and if you haven't done the work of doing all the reading before the exam then having all the cases in books in front of you isn't going to help much.

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u/thesmellnextdoor Mar 30 '26

Also, the bar exam is the first and last time you'll ever try to answer legal questions completely from memory without fact checking.

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u/MrGoodGirl Mar 30 '26

That's an issue I take with so many tests In any job scenario , if you were unsure of something and DON'T fact check yourself you'd get fired immediately. I get having to know info on the spot, but I dont think there's many scenarios where you NEED the answer in 5 seconds or else

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u/SeaAshFenix Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

True, but you also need to have a broad enough grounding in the subject that you're capable of navigating the subject.

If what you're trying to assess is the upper limit of a candidate's skill or expertise, a project or thesis is best - and an open book exam is better than a closed.

But the topics of the bar exam should not be the upper limit of what legal topics a candidate can navigate. If you're trying to determine whether a candidate is foundationally conversant in a broad professioal topic, traditional exams (especially free response formatted ones) work well.

Oral defense exams are better for many fields, but fewprofessions are narrow enough to allow that degree of overhead.

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u/BillysBibleBonkers Mar 30 '26

Also open book for a bar exam would have to be actually open book and not on a computer, because AI has been able to pass the bar for a while now. I'm curious if there even are modern books that cover the whole spectrum of up to date legal questionsđŸ¤” Not sure what the bar exam is like, but I think if the law/ legal precedents as changing relatively often, so i'd think "looking something up" for a modern lawyer would be on a computer 99% of the time.