Finance and Commerce » Bereft of technologies, millennials vie to become lawyers

Posted: 4:31 pm Wed, July 28, 2010
By  MARK A. COHEN

Mark A. Cohen

I was reading (via MinnPost) an excellent Christian Science Monitor story - “Are iPads, smart phones and the mobile web rewiring the way we think?” - when I started to think of the potential implications for the 800 or so law students signed up to take the bar exam this week at St. Paul’s RiverCenter.

The gist of the article is that new technologies have both made us smarter (by exposing us to and teaching us to navigate a wealth of information) and simultaneously dumber (by reducing our capacity for deep thought through narrowing our attention spans).

The bar exam is, of course, something where it would be helpful to have the capacity for deep thought. OK, maybe you don’t need it for the multistate portion, but for the essay exams at least.

I called Margaret Corneille, executive director of the Board of Law Examiners, to see if there had been any changes in the technologies students can use since the antediluvian days when I took the exam. (As I recall, we just chiseled an A, B or C onto a stone tablet then.)

As it turns out, there’s only one major change - about 85 percent of test takers type out their answers on a computer rather than the old-fashioned furious scribbling into a blue book. However, no other computer assistance is available.

Thus, would-be lawyers from Generation Y have to leave behind their smart phones, iPads, iPods and other portable electronic devices. The Christian Science Monitor story tells the tale of one youngster who, stripped of his electronic gadgets for a week, wound up getting lost in his own neighborhood. Hopefully, that won’t happen to any of Minnesota’s bar exam takers. On the other hand, maybe somebody that clueless ought not to be a lawyer anyway.

Corneille told me that exam takers are only allowed in a pencil (on multistate day), a pen (on essay day) and “Kleenex.” The Kleenex, I suppose, serves the dual functions of letting you clear out your nose and giving you something to cry into if things don’t go your way.

But the current generation of lawyers need not worry. Despite their allegedly short attention spans, there is no evidence the bar-passage rate is going down. Minnesota’s pass rate - which hovers at about 90 percent - remains one the highest in the country.

So what does all this electronic gadgetry mean for meaningful thought and discourse in the long run? I’d tell you, but my cell is ringing right now and I have a couple of e-mails to finish …

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