Jenny Kwon

Raising the Bar: How Alumna Jenny Kwon Is Rethinking Law Student Assessment

Jenny Kwon, Ed.D. ’16, is the Assistant Chancellor & Dean, and Chief of Staff to Chancellor & Dean David Faigman at UC Law San Francisco, where she helps guide strategic priorities for the school. Prior to this role, Kwon served as Associate Chief of Staff to the Chancellor at UC Berkeley, leveraging her CANDEL dissertation research to inform the establishment of a career-development program to help employees from underrepresented groups advance into leadership positions. Kwon began her career as a teacher and academic librarian before transitioning to roles in university administration.

Thanks to research conducted by a team of co-researchers, including UC Davis School of Education alumna Jenny Kwon, the Nevada Supreme Court reexamined how the state licenses new lawyers, promising far-reaching impacts on diversity and representation in the legal field.

The bar examination is the leading assessment to determine a candidate’s readiness to practice law, testing examinees on major aspects of their legal education. The research team explored the question of whether the bar exam accurately assesses a law student’s skills as an attorney—or just their ability to memorize information.

The team, which included Kwon and co-authors Jason M. Scott, Prof. Stephen N. Goggin, Rick Trachok, Prof. Sara Gordon, Dean Gould, Fletcher S. Hiigel, Prof. Leah Chan Grinvald, and Prof. David Faigman, have published their results in the article “Putting the Bar to the Test: An Examination of the Predictive Validity of Bar Exam Outcomes on Lawyering Effectiveness.” They conclude that students’ performance on the Nevada Bar and the Multistate Bar Examination does not determine their effectiveness as new lawyers. But it does serve as a formidable barrier preventing additional qualified and diverse candidates from entering the field.

Diversifying Legal Representation
As of 2024, there are more than 1.3 million active lawyers in the United States, 78% of whom identify as white and roughly 58% who identify as male. With statistics that skew so largely toward a single demographic, Kwon and her co-researchers are committed to ensuring that the bar exam is a fair and accurate measure of a person’s ability to lawyer vs. one’s ability and resources to master an exam.

The bar examination maintains notoriously high failure rates that often discourage students from retaking the test and impact their self-confidence as future lawyers. Its failure rates also hold racial implications for test takers. “According to American Bar Association data,” Kwon and her co-authors write, “In 2021, White law school graduates had first-time pass rates 24 percentage points greater than their Black peers, 13 percentage points greater than their Hispanic peers, and 15 percentage points greater than their Native American peers.”

By rethinking how students are assessed while in school and after graduation, Kwon and her colleagues believe that lawyers from a wider range of backgrounds will enter the profession, offering valuable insights on how to best serve people in need of legal support. “An imperfect testing system can inadvertently reduce the diversity of lawyers, which has consequences for the diversity of the profession. Having a profession reflect the diversity of its future clients is a goal worth striving for,” said Kwon. “Optics and accessibility matter.”

The Bar Is Missing the Mark
Kwon and her co-researchers conducted a study on 1,400 lawyers who were admitted to the Nevada Bar and sat for the Nevada Bar Exam between 2014 and 2020. They compared the study participants’ bar results against a self-assessment and qualitative evaluations from two supervisors, two peers, and one judge.

After reviewing 524 lawyers’ results, the team found no significant difference between the bar results and individual evaluations. Even when broken down by pass/fail and individual test score, the bar was only 1-6% off of the qualitative evaluations, demonstrating that the bar exam, which is meant to measure a new lawyer’s minimum competence in the legal profession, does not actually reflect a candidate’s performance in practice.

“We conclude that the bar exam—as it was administered in Nevada—does not result in scores that serve as bases for valid inferences about predicted lawyering effectiveness,” Kwon and her colleagues write. “Although some results achieve statistical significance, this threshold should not be used as the sole determining factor as to whether the bar exam serves its purpose.”

Taking Action in Higher Ed
Following this study, the Nevada Supreme Court decided to reexamine how the state licenses new lawyers. The court invited Kwon’s supervisor, Chancellor & Dean David Faigman of UC Law San Francisco, to serve on a task force for creating a more equitable bar examination. That task force recommended a new exam made up of a three-step assessment process, including a Foundational Law Examination, a Lawyering Performance Examination, and a Supervised Practice requirement. The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously approved the task force’s recommendations and are now working towards the development and implementation of a new exam. The team hopes that their research will lead to further studies in other jurisdictions.

“Getting through the rigors of law school is a significant accomplishment for any law student. But they all must pass a bar exam to practice law. We owe it to them and to their future clients to ensure that the bar exam indeed predicts their readiness and skills for lawyering rather than their ability to master a memorization test. And we owe it to them to ensure that the exam does not have disparate impacts on underrepresented groups.”

At the heart of Kwon’s work is her passion for education. As a former teacher who holds advanced degrees in education, library science and social welfare, she brings an invaluable, people-first approach to her collaborations with other researchers and stakeholders. “What my dissertation research showed me is that the inertia of time isn’t going to make a change,” said Kwon. “If you really want to make a change, you need to have initiative—you need to take action. And I am so grateful to UC Davis for helping me gain the confidence to put research into practice.”