Revisiting the Ontario Bar Exam
As has been widely reported over the past two weeks, the Law Society of Ontario is considering eliminating the existing bar exams and replacing them with “a mandatory skills-based course with assessments”.
The LSO is currently seeking feedback from lawyers and the public on its proposal to replace the existing barrister and solicitor examinations with an online course involving training and instruction as well as both interim and final assessments by trained lawyers.
Ontario’s Attorney General, Doug Downey, came out strongly against reform, tweeting:
“An objective, written and rigorous test is an important part of proving new lawyers are ready to practise law. Any changes that water down standards by scrapping written exams simply aren’t acceptable.”[1]
I recommend reading the LSO’s complete proposal report before making any assumptions or rushing to judgment on this issue.
In particular, the assumption that the proposed reform would “water down standards” requires examination.
Frankly, I question whether Ontario’s existing bar exams are truly an effective test of whether a licensing candidate is competent to practise law—and I expect that many other Ontario lawyers who wrote the bar exams in their current form for the past 20+ years may feel the same way.
At present, the Ontario bar exams are two open-book, multiple choice tests with 160 questions each. The LSO provides extensive written study materials to all candidates that are intended to be all one needs to prepare for and pass the exams, as well as a detailed guide intended to help candidates approach the exam. The exam purports to test 294 entry-level barrister competencies and 247 entry-level solicitor competencies.
(I wrote in more detail about the challenges associated with testing for and ensuring professional competence in one of my first columns for Slaw, here.)
Put simply, there is a widely-held view that passing the Ontario bar exams may well demonstrate that a candidate is good at indexing or sufficiently organized to find answers in the provided materials—but does not in fact demonstrate competency to practice law.
Personally, I question whether I am indeed competent to practise as a solicitor. I took few if any classes on trusts, wills and estates, real estate, tax, etc. in law school, and I prepared for the solicitor exam by reviewing and colour coding my LSO study materials in the few weeks leading up to it. I’m pretty sure that by the time I learned I had passed the exam later that summer—that is, at the time I had ostensibly demonstrated my competence to practise as a solicitor—I had already forgotten almost everything I “learned” while preparing.[2]
Beyond the more existential question of whether they actually test one’s competence, the LSO’s report also identifies various “increased operational challenges” with the current bar exams, including:
- They are costly to develop and deliver, and these costs are increasing year over year;
- Unauthorized materials “are becoming readily available because of the multitude of online sharing and social media platforms”, and screening candidates for such materials “would necessitate a significant rework of the licensing examinations”; and
- Accommodation requests “have increased significantly in recent years and the types of accommodations sought are becoming more complex to administer”.
Finally, recent research cited in the LSO’s report has cast doubt on the value of time-constrained multiple choice examinations in accurately assessing minimum competence for new lawyers.
It’s possible that I am in the minority, but I for one was glad to see that the LSO is reevaluating how it assesses entry-level competence and whether an open-book, high-stakes multiple choice exam should be part of that assessment.
I am also intrigued by the fact that the skills-based “Practice Readiness Education Program” (PREP) course designed by the Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLED) is now used in five provinces and territories (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut), and will be implemented in British Columbia starting in September 2026.
While no proposed course will be perfect, that does not mean that the status quo is preferable.
I look forward to learning the results of the LSO’s open consultation. In the meantime, I would be happy to read any comments on the current bar exam or the proposed PREP course in the comments below—particularly if readers in provinces that have already implemented PREP can offer insight based on their experience.
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[1] In a follow-up interview with the Globe and Mail, Mr. Downey clarified that he isn’t opposed to imposing additional training courses, but that at the end of the process there should be an exam with clear, right and wrong answers.
[2] Of course, one aspect of being a “competent lawyer” is knowing what you are not competent to do, which provides at least a theoretical safeguard against lawyers practising in areas in which they are insufficiently knowledgeable (as I am in relation to tax and real estate work, for example).
I certainly agree with you that lawyers should read the report, though I was far less impressed with it then you seem to be.
No doubt one of the reason lawyers have assumed that the change is intended to water down standards, is that one of the reasons cited by the LSO to eliminate the Bar Exam is that bar pass rate for NCA candidates is very low (50% and 58% for the barrister and solicitors exams, respectively). The obvious implications is that candidates who currently can’t pass the (not particularly demanding) Bar Exam would now be able to enter the profession. Given that, it’s not surprising that lawyers have, correctly in my view, interpreted this change as watering down standards. Honestly, that section read as a reason for keeping the bar exam, I don’t know how they thought it was a rationale for eliminating it.
You ask the key question, do licensing exams actually assess competence? One might have thought that the LSO would have discussed that issue in detail in the consultation report. Remarkably, it did not. This is even more remarkable given that the “Building A Better Bar” Report that they cited – apparently without having read carefully – does discuss that issue, and while acknowledging the limits of multiple choice open book exams, two of its three “model” licensing regime include multiple choice open book exams (and other aspects intended to assess skills that such exams don’t test, just as Ontario’s bar exam is not the sole component of our licensing regime- in contrast to many US jurisdictions where bar exams are the only component the licensing regime). Among the competencies it felt that such exams assessed were the knowledge portion of the ability to act professionally, the ability to research legal rules and non-legal matters, and one’s understanding of legal processes and sources of law and ability to interpret legal materials. Those are important competencies and there is no discussion in the report how a skills program would assess them. Simply put, the LSO’s interpretation of the Building a Better Bar report does not, in fact, reflect that report’s conclusions.
While the LSO discusses the “increased operational challenges” associated with organizing the bar exam, there’s no discussion of the operational challenges associated with running a professional skills course. The omission is glaring, since the LSO’s prior experience with running a professional skills course, from 2006-09, was terminated in part because the LSO found it too operationally burdensome to continue (they also concluded it had little value). Given that we know that PREP program costs 3 times the cost of administering the bar exam ($6100 to $2000), the former seems to be *much* more operationally challenging then the latter (and that’s assuming a skills program that now serves only a few hundred candidates could be expanded to serve 2800 without a significant increase in cost and operational issues – Ontario’s licensing program is larger than all other common law licensing programs in Canada *combined* by a fair margin). That the LSO only discussed the operational challenges of operating the Bar Exam and not the operating challenges associated with running a professional skills program – which challenges have been well-documented by the LSO in the past, tells us that this was not a particularly balanced report.
Finally, and again it’s a remarkable exclusion from the report, there’s no discussion of how a professional skills program would interact with the existing experiential learning component of the licensing regime, namely articling and the LPP. Are those components not currently imparting sufficient training for professional skills so as to justify supplementing them with a new assessment regime – the report doesn’t say (although its glowing assessment of the LPPP suggests not). If they are, what is the problem that the proposed skill program is intended to address? If they’re not, shouldn’t we be talking about reforming them, rather than eliminating the bar exam?
As I say, I agree with you that lawyers should carefully read the LSO’s consultation report, but I would encourage them to read it with a critical eye and to consider what the consultation report doesn’t say – the omissions are telling.