Busted Brackets and What Examinees Can Learn about the Problem with Perfection
The second round of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament hasn’t even begun, and yet there are no perfect brackets remaining. Zero. Nil. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Nothing.
It shouldn’t be too surprising, though. Selecting 63 games in either the men’s or women’s tournaments is nearly impossible. (As a side note, there are actually 67 games, but most bracket contests skip the First Four games in Dayton. Living in Dayton, and being a basketball purist, I consider the First Four games just as important and as much a part of the tournament as any other game. Am I right, Farleigh Dickenson?)
What might be surprising about this year’s brackets, though, is how quickly all the brackets—more than 20-million of them among all the online major games—were busted. It only took 25 games for the last unblemished brackets to fall. Last year, it took 28 games.
Let’s recap how it happened so quickly:
The tournament’s first game to finish was the toss-up game between No. 8 Maryland and No. 9 West Virginia. Maryland’s close 67-65 win busted more than half of the brackets from the get-go.
Then March Madness really lived up to the tournament’s nickname.
Huge upsets by No. 15 Princeton over No. 2 Arizona and by No. 13 Furman over No. 4 Virginia eliminated all but 787 brackets from perfection contention after the tournament’s first day.
Then Day 2 happened:
No. 7 Michigan State def. No. 10 USC — 450 perfect
No. 3 Xavier def. No. 14 Kennesaw State — 364 percent
No. 3 Baylor def. No. 14 UCSB — 314 percent
No. 5 Saint Mary's def. No. 12 VCU — 205 perfect
No. 2 Marquette vs. No. 15 Vermont — 179 perfect
No. 11 Pitt def. No. 6 Iowa State — 71 perfect
No. 6 Creighton def. No. 11 NC State — 30 perfect
No. 4 UConn def. No. 13 Iona — 26 perfect
And the game that knocked off the remaining 26 perfect brackets?
Farleigh Dickenson, who had to play two days earlier in Dayton in one of the First Four games, did what only one other No. 16 seed had ever done in the history of the men's tournament and beat a No. 1 seed.
FDU beat top-seed Purdue 63-58 and busted the remaining 26 perfect brackets. In fact, only 2.36 percent of all brackets had FDU beating Purdue, which was the second-worst percentage out of every team in the field.
In the grand scheme of things, though, a perfect bracket is a bit meaningless when it comes to winning your office pool or any other bracket contest. No one wins with a perfect bracket. You just need to be better than the other people who completed brackets. In fact, the longest (verifiable) streak of correct picks in an NCAA tournament bracket is 49, a streak that continued through the second game of the Sweet 16 in 2019.
Yet, there’s always a winner to the bracket pools.
So, what does this mean for bar preparation?
Understand that you should not strive for perfection during your studies.
Hear me out.
During the first class meeting of each bar prep course I teach, I usually go around the classroom and ask students their thoughts about the bar exam, which, for most of them, is just a few short months away.
Typical responses include “scared,” “nervous,” “overwhelming,” and other similar negative descriptions.
A regular response, too, goes something like this: “I’m a perfectionist, so I’m afraid that’s going to be a negative while studying for the bar exam.” I usually respond with a “Yup,” followed by a long pause, as I wait for the student’s initially worried look to turn into downright fright.
But then I try to convince them to let go of their perfectionism for purposes of preparing for the bar exam. 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.
Before I explain specifically why, 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.
Sure, examinees have no plans to be average on the bar exam, but examinees 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.
