Is Moving the MPRE to a Computer-based Delivery System a Good Decision by the NCBE?

Last month, the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced that it would convert its Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination from a paper-based to a computer-based delivery platform. The MPRE transition will happen in phases and will be completed by 2020, according to the NCBE. The NCBE promises that more details will be posted in the months ahead, but you can read its short announcement here.

While the NCBE has only announced plans to convert the MPRE to a computer-based exam, I can’t see the MPRE transition as anything else but a “test run” for moving the NCBE’s 200-question Multistate Bar Examination to a similar computer-based delivery system post-2020.

All this concerns me.

Frankly, I am not a fan of taking the ability to highlight, mark up, circle, underline, annotate, make notes, cross out bad answers, or draw connective arrows away from examinees as they are trying to select the best answer to detailed fact patterns at an average 1.8 minutes each (or a minute and 48 seconds each).

While examinees may still likely have the ability to highlight, make notes, and do many of the problem-solving techniques they have become accustomed to in law school, doing questions on the computer screen, for as long as three hours in a single session, in my opinion, is simply not the same as completing a paper-based exam.

While computer-based tests have been readily administered in other disciplines, the kinds of questions in those other disciplines, particularly in the health sciences, are more knowledge-based or recall-type questions than the kinds of analytical questions examinees see on the MPRE and the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam.

Multiple-choice questions drafted by the NCBE are detailed hypotheticals that are chockful of legally significant and irrelevant facts. Because the NCBE has an average of 1.8 minutes per question to test examinees, the test drafters do not have the luxury of including extraneous information within the test problem. So every word in a bar exam hypothetical is important. There is always some purpose for the NCBE’s inclusion of a particular word, and it is imperative for the examinee to figure why—is it to support an element in the relevant rule? Is it to identify a narrower issue than what the call of the question identified? Is it to encourage an ill-prepared exam-taker to pick a distractor? Is it to raise a defense or a counterargument?

Moving examinations to a purely computer-based delivery system, I fear, will discourage examinees from marking up the questions to the extent they would likely do so on a paper-based examination. As a result, I fear that examinees will inadvertently overlook important facts from test questions, thereby resulting in lower examination scores.

Granted, in academic literature, there does not seem to be a consensus on the equivalence of paper-and-pencil and computer-based test environments. Accordingly, more evidence is needed, especially in legal education.

So, while I will reserve judgment on the wisdom of moving the MPRE to a computer-based delivery system, my initial reaction is that the move may hurt future examinees of the MPRE and the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam.