I had a minor enlightening encounter this week that I thought worth sharing. I was going over the responses to some previous bar exam essay questions that a former student had wanted to review with me. One of the first questions we went over had a moderately long fact pattern involving a will of uncertain validity, and then asked simply, "Who will inherit the decedent's property?" The student properly recognized that there were several issues that had to be addressed in order to answer that question, and identified and fairly discussed most (but not all) of them.
Another question had been written in such a way that it clearly indicated that there were three specific issues to discuss: at the end of the page-long fact pattern, three separate questions were asked, in separate sentences, formatted into three separate enumerated paragraphs, as in*:
- Do you really want to hurt me?
- How can you mend a broken heart?
- Should I stay or should I go?
*Questions selected for illustration only. Not actual bar exam questions.
The student had done a fair job of answering these questions, creating a separate header for each one that incorporated the language of the question and then earnestly examining each question presented. A rule or two was misstated, some relevant facts were overlooked, but essentially the student had properly identified the relevant issues and had done some creditable analysis for each one.
A few questions later, we were looking at another question that seemed to wrap up in a similar way, with three enumerated statements. In this case, however, the question explained that one of the parties in the question had filed suit against another, and that the complaint had three allegations**:
- You think love is to pray, but I'm sorry I don't pray that way.
- You don't have to prove to me that you're beautiful to strangers; I've got lovin' eyes of my own.
- Now that I've surrendered so tenderly, you now want to leave, oooo you want to leave me.
**Valid only in jurisdictions that permit bar examination responses to be produced via karaoke.
After listing these allegations, the question asked, "Is the plaintiff likely to succeed on these issues? Explain."
As with the previous enumerated question, the student took cues from the formatting in the text to format the answer, again creating a separate header incorporating the language of each issue and then examining each issue separately. In doing so, however, the student implicitly assumed that the assertions made by the plaintiff were as sound and valid as the questions asked by the constructor of the question. In other words, the student took the precedent statements in the plaintiff's assertions — "You think love is to pray", "I've got lovin' eyes of my own", and "I've surrendered so tenderly" — as givens that could be employed to prove the asserted conclusions, rather than as unproven premises that needed to be demonstrated or disproved with reference to specific facts and legal rules. Thus, the analysis in this question was abbreviated and circular: "Because the plaintiff has lovin' eyes of his own, defendant does not have to prove that she is beautiful to strangers."
I pointed out to the student that, ordinarily, a decision maker would not simply take the plaintiff's assertions at face value, but would likely seek proof by citing facts and legal standards. The student acknowledged that it had not appeared, in the heat of the exam, that the implications of the two questions were very different — the first providing three issues for analysis, and the second requiring the examinee to determine the real issues themselves. The student had not had any trouble recognizing this need to figure out the relevant issues in the first question, so it wasn't an inability to dig deeper that had prevented her from doing so in the last question. Instead, we agreed, it had been a reflexive reaction to the form of the question — "1,2,3 means take those words as your givens". Making this explicit seemed to prepare the student to avoid doing the same thing in the future.
Just a neat little example of how the shortcuts we take, or make for ourselves, can sometimes take us places we don't want to go.
[Bill MacDonald]
