Atrisha Lewis, the chair of the professional development and competence committee at the Law Society of Ontario, said the current bar exam doesn’t do a good job of assessing whether a person is ready to be a practising lawyer.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
The Law Society of Ontario is considering scrapping the bar exam and replacing it with a skills-based course to address concerns that the time-constrained test is ineffective at assessing competency, that it unfairly disadvantages internationally trained candidates, and that the process can be stressful for test-takers.
If Ontario does away with the bar exam, it would join a growing number of provinces – including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island – that have already transitioned away from a test-based licensing process toward a course model.
But it’s a trend that has some in the legal profession worried.
Allan Ritchie, the chair of Loopstra Nixon LLP, is among the few who have spoken out publicly against the proposal.
“The bar exam is one of the final gatekeeping steps and an important part of protecting the public interest,” he said. “I am all in favour of greater access to the profession, but never at the expense of competence.”
In the course model, prospective lawyers still have to pass a number of evaluations, but those may not necessarily come in the form of a written test. Instead, candidates are evaluated on their legal writing and skills such as their ability to conduct a client interview and manage their practice.
Mr. Ritchie said that this process introduces subjectivity into the evaluation because a human is doing the assessing. By contrast, the multiple-choice bar exam has binary, right and wrong answers. He worries that some evaluators may be reluctant to fail students.
“I think it – subjective assessments – has the impact of lowering the bar and lowering the degree of preparation required by candidates,” Mr. Ritchie said.
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But Atrisha Lewis, the chair of the professional development and competence committee at the Law Society of Ontario, said the current bar exam doesn’t do a good job of assessing whether a person is ready to be a practising lawyer.
“The goal and the intention is not to lower the standards at all. In my view, I think the intention is to have a process that actually tests for competence,” she said of the review of the licensing process.
Currently, the Ontario bar exam consists of two multiple-choice, open-book tests – a barrister and a solicitor exam – that last 4½ hours each. Students are allowed to bring in research aides such as a detailed indexes of the legal texts. Ms. Lewis said that success on the bar exam can be more about whether a candidate has a good index than whether they know the material.
“When I was in law school, I got together with 10 friends and we split up the bar exam and we created an index because it’s a bit unwieldy to do it on your own,” said Ms. Lewis, the founder of Lewis Litigation. For international candidates without a network in Canada, this can put people at an obvious disadvantage, she said.
Foreign-trained lawyers have significantly lower pass rates on Ontario’s bar than domestic graduates. Data from the Ontario law society show that as of 2023, those with Canadian law degrees had an 88-per-cent pass rate on the barrister exam and an 81-per-cent pass rate on the solicitor exam, while foreign-trained graduates had a pass rate of 58 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. Internationally trained lawyers are also overrepresented among those in the profession facing regulatory complaints.
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Ms. Lewis said the idea of moving to a course system is not about making it easier for internationally trained lawyers to pass – it’s about ensuring that all licensees are set up to succeed and are competent to be lawyers.
A September report from the law society’s professional development committee highlighted other concerns with the status quo, including fears that the current bar does not assess practical skills, such as legal writing and oral advocacy, and that some candidates found the experience “extremely stressful,” taking “a significant toll on their mental health.” These complaints came more often from internationally trained and Indigenous candidates.
Criticism of the bar exam as an accurate measure of legal competency has been around for years in Canada and the United States, although the idea has not taken off south of the border in the same way, with a handful of exceptions, including in Oregon. Even the California state bar – a notoriously difficult exam that aspiring lawyer Kim Kardashian recently revealed she failed – studied the idea of axing its test in 2023. The state’s Supreme Court rejected the proposal.
And to those who may feel nostalgia toward the Ontario bar exam, Ms. Lewis noted that the test in its current form has only existed for about about 20 years. Prior to that, candidates went through a course system, with tests at the end of each section. She said that whichever course model Ontario adopts, the plan would be to have candidates assessed throughout its duration.
Mr. Ritchie said he was among the last cohort to go through this system in 2005. He said he’s not opposed to the idea of a skills-based course, but he believes there should be an objective test at the end.
The majority of jurisdictions in Canada that operate without a bar exam use a skills program called the Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP) from the Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education. (Last month, British Columbia announced it too would be moving to the PREP course.)
When asked about concerns that the evaluations introduce the opportunity for subjectivity, the organization’s chief executive officer Liza Worthington said that all the evaluators are lawyers who are trained on the same rubric. There are also safeguards in place to identify evaluators who are too tough or easy in their marking.
Ontario’s law society began consultations on reforming its licensing process in September and expects to finish in January next year. The committee hopes to report back sometime later in 2026.