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While the jury’s still out on a proposal to replace the Ontario bar exam with a skills-based course, law schools in British Columbia have made the switch, with the first batch of students set to experience the new system this fall.
B.C. is the sixth province to scrap the bar exam in favour of a four-phase program meant to assess legal knowledge, advocacy, ethics, practice management and other skills, following in the footsteps of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Nunavut.
The province’s law society announced the change last October, saying training for the bar needed to be brought up to date as the needs of students — and the skills required to practise law — had evolved.
The news came about a month after its Ontario counterpart floated a similar shift as a better alternative to revamping the bar exam, which consists of two tests on separate days.
The proposal divided Ontario’s legal profession at the time, with some arguing the multiple-choice, open-book exam evaluates reading speed rather than legal know-how, while others argued it represents an objective assessment of students’ knowledge of the law regardless of its shortcomings.
Consultations on the proposed switch wrapped in January, and the Law Society of Ontario said last month it had not reached a decision, nor did it have a time frame to make the call.
In B.C., where the new program also replaces a full-time, 10-week course, some recent graduates said that while there are pros and cons to both systems, it would be best if the assessment process was consistent across Canada.
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“I honestly think it would be better to have a standardized kind of style of testing — either everyone’s doing a bar exam or everyone’s doing a skills-based course. I think that would make things more cohesive and just easier for people as they transition across provinces,” said Sydney Dahrouge, who went to law school in Alberta before completing the bar training and exam as well as articling in B.C.
The current patchwork of assessments “makes things confusing,” Dahrouge said in a recent interview.
Though the program now offers more flexibility, some of her law school friends in Alberta struggled to get through the skills-based course while completing their articling, a mandatory job placement for graduates to learn the ropes from experienced lawyers, she said.
“They found it really challenging to have it integrated while they were working … 10- to 12-hour days at work, having to go home and study, do these assessments or assignments,” she said.
In the last few years, law students in Alberta have had the option to take an accelerated, full-time version of the course before starting their articling term, a development that came after students reported challenges juggling both sets of demands.
Students in B.C. also have the same choice. The first full-time program was scheduled to start this month, with the next cycle set for February, while the part-time version is planned for May.
Richard Jiang, who was in the same articling cohort as Dahrouge, said his work experience has made him believe a more practical approach might be more helpful than the traditional exam, especially given the increasing use of artificial intelligence in law firms.
Passing the bar exam depended on navigating an index quickly, a skill that’s now obsolete when AI “can scan an entire legal database and pull a set of relevant cases or the precise rule in a few seconds,” Jiang, who attended the University of British Columbia’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, said in an email.
“AI handles the retrieval; the role of the junior (lawyer) is shifting more and more towards judgment, drafting, and other aspects of practice that traditionally came later,” he said.
Focusing on practical assignments can likely better gauge a student’s thought process, communication, presentation and ethics, among other measures, he said.
While there’s a risk of inconsistencies in marking compared to a multiple-choice, black-and-white exam, Jiang said he believes “the shift away from exam-based assessment isn’t a lowering of standards, it’s a realignment of standards with the actual demands of modern practice.”
Still, both Jiang and Dahrouge said the transition from one system to the other might prove bumpy for the first cohort. In a profession that relies heavily on mentorship, no one will be able to tell students what to expect or how to prepare, they said.
“They’re kind of the first test subjects of like, how is this going to go? How are things going to work?” Dahrouge said. “But I think if you just do the work, you do what they are telling you to do, you do your studying … I’m sure everyone will do great.”
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