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Bar News - May 23, 2003 NH Bar Examiners To Review Scores A SCORING ERROR by the administrators of the Multistate Bar Exam is requiring bar examiners in all but two states to go back and review the answer sheets of thousands of aspiring lawyers. In New Hampshire, the NH Board of Bar Examiners has decided that no one who has been given a passing grade on the NH Bar Exam at the February sitting will have his or her passing result reversed, said Frederick Coolbroth, chair of the Bar Examiners. He said the exams of those test-takers who were close to passing would be reviewed to see if the scoring error puts them closer to passing. Thirty-seven admittees from the February 2003 sitting were scheduled to be sworn in on May 19. It was not known at press time whether there would be additions to that number due to the scoring error review. The review of the 70 exams administered in New Hampshire could result in some borderline test-takers receiving a passing grade, either because their recalculated multistate bar exam scores crossed the magic pass-fail barrier, or because their improved scores moved them into a "re-read" category that could result in a favor able re-examination of their NH essay-question scoring. On May 7, the national organization that administers the Multistate Bar Exam, American College Testing (ACT), announced that a scoring error on one question would require that scores be revised for more than a third of the 20,204 people who took the exam last February. According to a Boston Globe article, ACT failed to communicate to graders checking answer sheets that there was more than one correct answer for one of the 200 questions on the exam. Nationally, almost 7,700 people were either given credit for an incorrect answer or were not given credit when they answered correctly, but only a fraction of those test-takers had scores that were close to the pass-fail borderline. According to Debbie Bills of the NH Supreme Court Clerk’s Office, who works with the new admittees, a recalculation of NH Bar Exam scores has not happened in the 19 years she has worked at the court, although a similar incident occurred just before she began working at the court.
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