| Statements |
Occasionally AASE members are compelled to issue public statements on matters related to law school pedagogy, law school academic support, bar examination procedures, diversity and inclusion, and other related topics of interest to the organization.You can read those statements below.
February 3, 2025 AASE Cautions Against Use of Digital-Only ExamsFebruary 4, 2025 – For Immediate Release The Association of Academic Support Educators Cautions Against Digital-Only Bar Exams Multiple jurisdictions, including the state of California, have announced plans to move forward with a digital-only bar exam that will prohibit examines from utilizing print materials during standard exam administration. The Association of Academic Support Educators* cautions jurisdictions […]
July 9, 2024 Scattershot Rollout of NextGen Exam May Exacerbate Disparate Bar Pass OutcomesScattershot Rollout of The Nextgen Bar Exam May Exacerbate Disparate Bar Pass Outcomes Along Socioeconomic and Racial Lines Law school graduates will not be sufficiently prepared for the new bar exam scheduled to be administered in 2026. Twenty jurisdictions have already adopted the NextGen bar exam and six of the 20 have committed to administering […]
January 8, 2024 AASE Submits Comment to Proposed ABA Standard 405Dear Chair McCormack: On behalf of the Association of Academic Support Educators (“AASE”), we write in support of the proposed amendments to ABA Standard 405 with the inclusion of our suggested revisions that explicitly include “bar success” professors in the faculty categories listed in the proposed amendment. Founded in 2013, AASE is a non-profit organization […]
September 6, 2023 AASE Raises Serious Concerns About NextGen Prototype QuestionsFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Statement from the Association of Academic Support Educators Concerning the NextGen Bar Exam The Association of Academic Support Educators (AASE) has serious concerns about the prototype questions released by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) for the NextGen bar exam scheduled to be administered in July 2026. The NCBE’s Testing Task […]
February 25, 2022 AASE Bids Paulina Davis Farewell, Welcomes Natalie RodriguezPaulina Davis will be stepping down from her position as Secretary on the Board of Directors for AASE because February 18th was her last day at New York Law School. Paulina will be moving on to a very exciting project outside of legal education: she will be making a documentary film focusing on an important […]
July 28, 2021 AASE asks Supreme Courts to respond to July 2021 Examsoft technical issues affecting bar examineesFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Statement of the Association of Academic Support Educators In light of the technical issues with the use of ExamSoft in the administration of online and in-person bar exams this week, we ask Supreme Courts nationwide to issue an announcement to July 2021 bar takers acknowledging the unacceptable problems and offering assurances that software […]
February 21, 2021 Association of Academic Support Educators Bar Advocacy Committee Best Practices for Online Bar ExaminationThe Association of Academic Support Educators (“AASE”) is a non-profit professional organization for law school academic support educators. AASE members collaborate to develop research-based teaching methods and enhancement programs that empower students to succeed in law school, on the bar exam, and in the practice of law. AASE members are subject matter experts in assessment delivery, […]
July 6, 2020 Joint Statement of the Association of Academic Support Educators and the AALS, Section on Academic Support ProgramsWe are in the midst of a 400-year-old pandemic that is systemic racism. The continuous oppression and repeated slayings of Black and other marginalized populations in the face of police brutality, hatred, and bias must cease. Black Lives Matter. We call out the names of all those who have fallen victim to police brutality. George […]
May 13, 2020 Association of Academic Support Educators’ Position on ABA Standard 316Diane F. Bosse, Chair Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar American Bar Association 321 N. Clark Street, 19th Floor Chicago, IL 60654 Academic Support Educators by Respected Members of the Council: On behalf of the Association of Academic Support Educators (“AASE”), we are writing to join the Society for […] Full Statements
AASE Cautions Against Use of Digital-Only Exams February 4, 2025 – For Immediate Release While many of this current law school generation grew up reading online, the research surprisingly shows that the “screen inferiority effect has increased (emphasis added) in the past 18 years,” a finding that is consistent across age groups.[2] Even when the amount of text is small and does not require scrolling, such as a single multiple-choice question, performance was harmed under time pressure conditions.[3] Although more studies are required, the need to scroll during reading may also be a “possible obstacle to comprehension during digital reading.”[4] A digital-only exam will require examinees to scroll through multiple pages of documents, thus introducing the added complexity of timed, digital-reading comprehension to which examines were not exposed during three years of law school. Contrary to the aim of capturing practice-readiness, an exam that requires digital reading, note-taking, annotating, and utilization without physical copies or scratch materials, under timed conditions, does not mirror a task entry-level lawyers face. The decision to deliver a digital-only bar exam represents a consequential departure from the status quo of paper copies and scrap paper currently provided to examinees. This move to a digital-only bar exam is reminiscent of bar exams administered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on limited data from those administrations, online examinees performed significantly worse than those who took the exam in person.[5] Moreover, a sudden shift to a digital format brings with it heightened risks of technology malfunctions. In the event of software crashes, power outages, or unstable internet connections, examinees’ performance could be severely compromised through no fault of their own. These (un)anticipated disruptions can compound anxiety in an already high-stakes setting, potentially affecting overall performance. Given these risks, relying on a digital platform for a licensing exam presents serious concerns regarding fairness and uniformity across testing conditions. Research also indicates that lengthy digital reading can exacerbate eyestrain, fatigue, and reduced concentration, especially in high-pressure test environments.[6] Extended screen use could introduce an additional barrier to performance for examinees with visual impairments or those prone to migraines.[7] In these cases, providing a paper option might mitigate physical discomfort and align with universal design principles to make the test accessible to the widest possible range of candidates. A move to a digital-only bar exam without scratch paper also raises equity concerns and access to the practice of law. In jurisdictions where bar examinees are permitted to use their own laptops or devices, those examinees who can afford to purchase larger-screen devices will be advantaged as they will have more real estate on their screens, thus decreasing the amount of scrolling an examinee needs. Additionally, for those examinees with ADHD, research shows that “… under task conditions that favor good metacognitive skills, specifically self-monitoring, learning from digital texts leads to inferior reading comprehension for students with ADHD relative to their peers without ADHD.”[8] Similarly, English as a Second Language learners and neurodiverse individuals may benefit significantly from tactile strategies, such as physically highlighting words and flipping pages, to reinforce comprehension. By removing or limiting these tactile strategies to a digital-only format, NextGen will likely significantly disadvantage candidates relying on these learning methods to mitigate reading difficulties. *The Association of Academic Support Educators (AASE) is the nation’s only non-profit organization representing law school faculty and administrators in the field of academic support and bar readiness. AASE, through its Bar Advocacy Committee advocates for fairness and accessibility in the bar licensure process. [1] Lindsay E. Koso, Findings of Research Studies on Reading Comprehension Between Digital and Print Formats: Implications for the NextGen Bar Exam, Roger Williams Univ. Legal Studies Paper No. 221 (2020), available here. See also Pablo Delgado, Cristina Vargas, Rakefet Ackerman & Ladislao Salmerón, Don’t Throw Away Your Printed Books: A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Reading Media on Reading Comprehension, 34 Educ. Res. Rev. 23 at 34 (2018).
Scattershot Rollout of NextGen Exam May Exacerbate Disparate Bar Pass Outcomes July 9, 2024 Scattershot Rollout of The Nextgen Bar Exam May Exacerbate Disparate Bar Pass Outcomes Along Socioeconomic and Racial Lines Amy Meyers, Director of Academic Skills & Bar Success at Willamette University College of Law, reached out to the Association of Academic Support Educators desperately seeking help to fill in the many information gaps about the NextGen exam. In an email to the Association’s president, Meyers pleaded: “My knowledge is based solely on the NCBE press releases and what I can gather from the [academic support listserv]. As a lawyer, I don’t like relying on hearsay. As an educator, I don’t like trying to teach based on the breadcrumbs I can piece together from those sources. It seems to me that my students should be preparing for such a high-stakes test as the NextGen Bar Exam with more clarity than I can provide. That’s not a comfortable feeling.” The proprietor of the NextGen exam, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”), has published only piecemeal information distributed over sporadic intervals about the exam’s substantive content and format. Recent statements by the NCBE have contradicted the entity’s earlier promises about the scaled-down exam. The incomplete and inconsistent messaging from the NCBE could potentially impede the performance of bar takers and further contribute to disparate bar passage rates along socio-economic and racial lines. This scattershot approach to communicating essential information leaves law school academic support faculty without the clear, consistent, and reliable guidance necessary to prepare graduates for the new bar exam. With the added emphasis on bar passage in accreditation standards and law school rankings, legal educators cannot afford to silently acquiesce to the significant uncertainties presented by this rollout of an exam that will determine the future careers of law school graduates and the standing of law schools. After careful scrutiny of all released information, we find the small set of sample questions covering only limited subject matter, coupled with the unclear description of the most recent changes to the not-yet-released exam, wholly insufficient to offer fair and reasonable notice as to the format, content, scoring, scaling, and resources available for the licensure exam. Our specific concerns are summarized below: The NCBE stated, that the new exam will no longer require examinees to have a base of knowledge in the areas of conflict of laws, family law, trusts, and estates, or secured transactions, but these topics may still be included in certain legal scenarios for which examinees are provided relevant reference materials . . . .[2] However, on May 29, 2024, the NCBE contradictorily announced that from July 2026 through February 2028, family law and trusts and estates will appear on every NextGen exam in a performance task and may also be included in integrated question sets.[3] In addition to the late release of the significant additions of two areas of black letter law, we are deeply concerned that the NCBE has not provided a content scope outline for Trusts or Estates. The test maker has stated that these content outlines will be published by “late 2024,” but that illusive commitment still leaves law schools with less than three full semesters to make the necessary adjustments to curricular content. The information currently provided by the NCBE is too vague to allow prospective NextGen examinees to thoroughly prepare for the exam. Due to these uncertainties, we urge the NCBE to limit the subject matter of the exam to exclude Family Law, Trusts, and Estates. Bar applicants taking an exam in 2026 should have the benefit of knowing the scope of exam content when they entered law school. To do otherwise will place early NextGen applicants at a comparative disadvantage to applicants who will be taking the UBE in 2026 and 2027. Insufficient Pilot Testing Nestled in the release of the pilot testing results, is the NCBE’s decision to exclude additional legal resources from the NextGen exam. According to the NCBE, the aim of NextGen exam is to make the bar exam more realistic and to reduce the amount of legal knowledge that candidates must commit to memory for the exam, while emphasizing law practice skills. Lawyers in practice do not rely on memorization, but on skilled access to legal and information resources. Yet, despite the reality of law practice and its own claimed intention, the NCBE appears to have done an about-face on providing the Federal Rules of Evidence as reference material on the exam.[5] This significant departure does not support the assessment of practice-ready lawyers. The overwhelming majority of current law students who will be taking a bar exam in 2026 and 2027 have or will have completed the required courses in Legal Research and Writing prior to sample questions being released. The unfairness of the promised late release will be compounded on individuals who lack the time and money resources to engage in costly bar preparation programs. Those individuals are more likely to benefit from law school academic support programs, and yet the academic support faculty have not been able to offer any meaningful guidance that will make their bar exam success more likely. We urge the NCBE to delay testing of legal research until 2028 or some future date when law students can have fair notice and access to the scope and content of exam questions in this areas to be tested. Academic support faculty cannot appropriately aid in the bar readiness of our students and future graduates with vague, incomplete, and constantly changing information from the test maker. We implore the NCBE for its cooperation and recognition of the potential to exacerbate alarming disparities in test outcomes for law school graduates who have the greatest need for academic support programs. AASE Submits Comment to Proposed ABA Standard 405 January 8, 2024 Dear Chair McCormack: On behalf of the Association of Academic Support Educators (“AASE”), we write in support of the proposed amendments to ABA Standard 405 with the inclusion of our suggested revisions that explicitly include “bar success” professors in the faculty categories listed in the proposed amendment. Founded in 2013, AASE is a non-profit organization made up of academic and bar support professionals from every ABA law school in the United States and Canada. One of our missions is to raise awareness of issues affecting law school academic and bar support professionals to other constituencies and law school-related organizations, specifically as it relates to employment inequity. Faculty status, or lack thereof, remains a consistent issue impacting our membership, many of whom teach students at all levels of their institution’s curriculum, and bear the same duties and responsibilities as so-called “podium faculty” without the commensurate pay or ability to vote on law school issues. Though we are educators who teach law students and graduates using skills rooted in legal doctrine, we are often hired as administrators, staff, or non-tenured faculty members instead of full-time tenured faculty. This places many of our constituents in the unenviable position of being responsible for the core missions and outcomes of the law school, such as ABA-mandated bar passage standards, without the power to make beneficial changes or suggestions to curricular and hiring matters. This second-tier status perpetuates already existing inequalities and deprives many AASE members of faculty status and security of employment. These administrative/staff designations are given despite the fact that academic and bar success professors fall squarely within the definition of faculty set forth in Standard 401 in Chapter 4 of the 2023-2024 Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law School (the “Standards”): A law school shall have a faculty whose qualifications and experience enable the law school to operate in compliance with the Standards and carry out its program of legal education. The faculty shall possess a high degree of competence, as demonstrated by academic qualification, experience in teaching or practice, teaching effectiveness, and scholarship.
AASE Raises Serious Concerns About NextGen Prototype Questions September 6, 2023 |
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