Legal Certification Examination
A Legal Certification Examination is an certification examination for legal practice.
- AKA: Bar Exam.
- Context:
- It can (typically) be composed of Legal Certification Exam Questions.
- It can (typically) be taken by a Legal Certification Examination Taker.
- It can (often) be associated with a Legal Practice Examination Score.
- It can be associated with a Practice Legal Certification Exam.
- ...
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), Law School, Law Degree, Bar examination in the United States.
References
2023
- (Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination Retrieved:2023-10-12.
- A bar examination is an examination administered by the bar association of a jurisdiction that a lawyer must pass in order to be admitted to the bar of that jurisdiction.
2023
- "GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam: What That Means for Artificial Intelligence Tools in the Legal Industry."
- QUOTE: CodeX–The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and the legal technology company Casetext recently announced what they called “a watershed moment.” Research collaborators had deployed GPT-4, the latest generation Large Language Model (LLM), to take—and pass—the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). GPT-4 didn’t just squeak by. It passed the multiple-choice portion of the exam and both components of the written portion, exceeding not only all prior LLM’s scores, but also the average score of real-life bar exam takers, scoring in the 90th percentile.
Casetext’s Chief Innovation Officer and co-founder Pablo Arredondo, JD ’05, who is a Codex fellow, collaborated with CodeX-affiliated faculty Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito to study GPT-4’s performance on the UBE. In earlier work, Katz and Bommarito found that a LLM released in late 2022 was unable to pass the multiple-choice portion of the UBE. Their recently published paper, “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam” quickly caught the national attention.
- QUOTE: CodeX–The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and the legal technology company Casetext recently announced what they called “a watershed moment.” Research collaborators had deployed GPT-4, the latest generation Large Language Model (LLM), to take—and pass—the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). GPT-4 didn’t just squeak by. It passed the multiple-choice portion of the exam and both components of the written portion, exceeding not only all prior LLM’s scores, but also the average score of real-life bar exam takers, scoring in the 90th percentile.
2023
- (Katzartin et al., 2023) ⇒ Daniel M. Katzartin, Michael James Bommarito, Shang Gao, and Pablo Arredondo. (2023). “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam.” Available at SSRN 4389233 DOI:10.2139/ssrn.4389233
- ABSTRACT: In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the zero-shot performance of a preliminary version of GPT-4 against prior generations of GPT on the entire Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), including not only the multiple-choice Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), but also the open-ended Multistate Essay Exam (MEE) and Multistate Performance Test (MPT) components. On the MBE, GPT-4 significantly outperforms both human test-takers and prior models, demonstrating a 26% increase over ChatGPT and beating humans in five of seven subject areas. On the MEE and MPT, which have not previously been evaluated by scholars, GPT-4 scores an average of 4.2/6.0 as compared to much lower scores for ChatGPT. Graded across the UBE components, in the manner in which a human tast-taker would be, GPT-4 scores approximately 297 points, significantly in excess of the passing threshold for all UBE jurisdictions. These findings document not just the rapid and remarkable advance of large language model performance generally, but also the potential for such models to support the delivery of legal services in society.
2023
- (Sawada et al., 2023) ⇒ Tomohiro Sawada, Daniel Paleka, Alexander Havrilla, Pranav Tadepalli, Paula Vidas, Alexander Kranias, John J Nay, Kshitij Gupta, and Aran Komatsuzaki. (2023). “ARB: Advanced Reasoning Benchmark for Large Language Models.” In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.13692. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2307.13692.
- QUOTE: ... Applying law involves the application logical reasoning, in addition to grasping legal knowledge. This makes assessments of legal skills an especially attractive type of language model benchmark, where we are attempting to assess the reasoning and intelligence of these models. Furthermore, if the models better understand law, they can be more reliable and ultimately more useful in real-world applications, potentially even increasing the efficiency and transparency of governments more broadly.
Most lawyers in the U.S. go to law school, graduate, then study for the Bar Examination, and then must pass the bar before going on to practice law professionally. To evaluate legal understanding of the models, we use an older Bar Examination practice set that, to the best of our knowledge, is not available online in a way that could have led to its inclusion in training data for the language models that we are assessing. The practice bar exam we administer to the various language models covers most major areas of law and therefore it tests legal reasoning and broad U.S. legal knowledge.
- QUOTE: ... Applying law involves the application logical reasoning, in addition to grasping legal knowledge. This makes assessments of legal skills an especially attractive type of language model benchmark, where we are attempting to assess the reasoning and intelligence of these models. Furthermore, if the models better understand law, they can be more reliable and ultimately more useful in real-world applications, potentially even increasing the efficiency and transparency of governments more broadly.