The career that measures character
Last weekend, I attended the culminating activity of our Science and Risk Communication students under Ms. Kel Almazan. Her students, my creativity students two years ago, presented the results of their engagement with partner communities.
Using the principles of human-centered design and social sciences research, the students addressed problems like urban community waste management, disaster risk management for indigenous groups, farmers’ many struggles, and reproductive health.
This was their final assessment, their exam, so to speak, to test whether they could synthesize information and theory into a prototype that directly addressed the needs and context of a specific group.
When I developed the course years ago, noncommunication specialists asked: Shouldn’t the class teach communication majors the scientific terms, and then quiz them so that they can create fact-based products later?
The problem with this thinking is that it reduces science to information and communication to repackaging. To truly represent the scholarly and professional sides of science and risk communication, however, students have to engage with it as a social science. Their assessments need to push them to think of people and processes, not grades or barebones facts.
Any assessment has to represent the field for which one is trained. Tests, especially standardized ones, can only measure how much one can regurgitate in a limited time. The bar exam is no exception.
Edward Chico, a professor and lawyer, put it articulately in his Facebook post: the exam is difficult because of the volume of information one has to memorize, but the exam itself does not require analysis or critical thinking. It cannot predict whether one will be a competent lawyer.
There is also no rubric for checking the essay portions. Examiners can fail an examinee for bad grammar, verbosity, or just because.
The research literature on the United States bar exam has also long critiqued its validity. For this column, I draw on the published articles of Edward Bell, 1971, and Scott DeVito and colleagues, 2024, in the Law Journal Library; Kyle Rozema, 2021, in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies; and Jason Scott and colleagues, 2024, in the Journal of Law and Empirical Analysis.
The US bar exams, taken at the national and sometimes state levels, have faced accusations of being biased against certain ethnicities and immigrant groups for whom English is not the first language, and whose cultures do not match that of the US.
The exam has also been criticized as an indicator only of one’s ability to parrot back information. Research, after all, shows a low correlation between passing the bar and the effectiveness of new lawyers. In fact, within the first decade of practice, those who passed the bar were publicly sanctioned at roughly the same rate as those who had not.
The bar exam, therefore, is a snapshot in time. In Bell’s words, it can overshadow years of hard work, and “seeks to substitute a good memory for the calm, cool reflective reasoning that good lawyers employ without regard to [a time limit].”
To pass the bar is well and good. But to look down on those who passed after several takes? This was what supporters of Vice President Sara Duterte did when they boasted that she passed the bar on her first take, while Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo passed on her second. It was an attempt to salvage one’s reputation by attacking another.
Robredo, who didn’t pass the first time because she had to tend to her sick daughter while taking the exam, and who worked with a spotless record as a public servant, versus Duterte, who now faces corruption charges.
The comparison is immaterial when one considers what the two actually did as lawyers. High scores are useless when they reflect only one day in the life of a professional. A single exam result does not a public servant make.
The test, and any assessment, is a milestone to mark what was, not a predictor of what is to come. Like any standardized test, the bar measures memory, not whether the information can be synthesized to defend a stance, critique a law in its context, or craft a new law rooted in reality.
As I watched my former students last weekend, I could not help getting teary-eyed: the community representatives invited to critique their work said they wished the students had more time to do fieldwork, because their empathy had emerged from their efforts, their artistry had found a way to reflect the narratives of those in need—they were listening to stories and telling their own.
No written exam would have captured that.
Passing the bar, or any exam at all, on the first try is good. But to try again when one failed after months of study? That’s to join the ranks of those who passed the bar on the second take: Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kamala Harris.
Trying again, persevering, and finally succeeding? That is real strength—and far more inspiring than credentials minus character. That’s someone to be proud of—not someone to constantly defend.
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