MLB's Perfect Game, and a Reminder About Perfection on the Bar Exam
Last night witnessed just the 24th perfect game in Major League Baseball history—and the first in almost 11 years.
The New York Yankees’ Domingo Germán pitched the perfect game against the Oakland Athletics, meaning that he allowed no runner on base by any means while pitching all nine innings. The Yankees won the game 11-0.
A perfect game is a complete game pitched without a runner reaching base either by hit, base-on-balls, or error. It is one of the rarest feats in baseball.
At the beginning of every major-league game, an average pitcher facing a lineup of average hitters has a .000983 percent chance of pitching a perfect game, according to SBNATION. That's the equivalent of one perfect game every 34 seasons! The "no errors" requirement is mostly out of the pitcher’s control, which is why throwing a perfect game is a huge celebration for the entire team.
So, what does this mean for bar preparation?
This is an opportunity to revisit some of the tips I wrote in a previous blog post about "perfection" ("Busted Brackets and What Examinees Can Learn about the Problem with Perfection," March 18, 2023).
Understand that you should not strive for perfection during your bar studies. While perfectionism is a very admirable trait—and a characteristic of many highly successful people—it can actually hurt strong examinees on the bar exam.
It’s important to understand first that the bar exam is a minimum competency exam, so knowing everything there is possibly to know about a particular topic isn’t necessary. This means, in fact, being “average” is general good enough to pass.
But, sure, examinees have no plans to be average on the bar exam, but they shouldn’t strive for a perfect score either. But between “average” and “perfect,” there’s plenty of room for successful bar examinees. In fact, in most jurisdictions, a bar examinee can be below average and still pass the bar exam comfortably since most states’ first-time bar passage rates fall around 70 percent (meaning that, roughly, 20% of the students below the median score pass).
With that said, here’s why students shouldn’t adhere tightly to their perfectionist tendencies.
There’s too much material to learn 100%.
Let’s face it. Depending on the jurisdiction, examinees might have as many as 20 different subjects to know.
In terms of the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam (MBE), there are only 25 questions to test examinees in each of the seven MBE subjects. Thus, it’s not possible for the examiners to test you on everything there is to know in each MBE subject.
I understand that it can be difficult for some examinees to let go of the idea of being absolutely fully prepared. But it makes no sense to bang your head against the desk to fully understand the Rule Against Perpetuities when so few people actually answer those kinds of questions correctly anyway. It’s much better to chalk a RAP question as a loss (examinees have a 25% chance of getting it right anyway just by guessing, which might not be too much worse than the actual percent-correct score overall) and focus on other areas where spending more time reviewing actually translates into potentially scoring more points (hint: negligence in Torts, free speech in Constitutional Law, and mortgages in Real Property, to name just a few areas).
Examiners understand that essays aren’t going to be perfect.
Bar exam essay graders know that the essays they are reviewing aren’t written by individuals with unlimited time to write, rewrite, proofread, and edit. They also know that the bar exam is perhaps the most important and highest stakes assessment examinees will likely ever take. Bar graders usually take this into account and, as a result, they are a bit more forgiving than, say, law professors. In any event, bar graders spend just mere minutes reading an examinee’s response. Their lack of time spent on reviewing a response means that they’re not going to care too much about perfection. They just want to get through reviewing that response so that they can get on to the next one, finish up, and then get back to their paying jobs.
A perfect essay score includes a wide spectrum of quality.
With different jurisdictions scoring essays differently, some jurisdictions do suggest that their bar graders evenly distribute their scores among the possible range of scores. That means that if a jurisdiction scores essays on a 1-to-6 score, then bar graders in those jurisdictions are instructed to “give” the same number of 1s, 2s, 3s, and so on. This means that there are just as many 6s given as 1s (and any other score, too). This also means that there’s a wide range of quality of responses—from perfect to not-so-perfect—between the best 6s and the worst 6s.
You don’t need to be perfect on the bar exam.
In terms of the MBE, the average scaled score out of 200 scaled points is typically around 140. Raw score-wise, a scaled score of 140 probably translates to a raw percent-correct score of 65 percent. On any other assessment, 65 percent would likely be a fail. But on the bar exam, a raw score of 65 percent correct is average—and average on the bar exam is passing, with a cushion!
Remember that the bar exam is a minimum competency exam.
The bar exam has been labeled a minimum competency test—it’s an attempt by state boards of law examiners to establish minimal acceptable levels for educational attainment. But examinees sometimes confuse pass-fail law school courses with the minimum competency bar exam.
In law school, many students equate pass-fail courses as permission to put in “minimum effort” in order to pass the course. That’s not what I’m advocating for the bar exam. Rather, by understanding that the bar exam is a minimum competency exam, examinees can better focus their time, effort, and completion of practice problems on those areas in each subject that are most frequently tested. In other words, study smarter, not harder. Knowing 100% of the most likely testable areas within each subject rather than 70% or less of 100% of the complete universe of materials is more important.
