Roundtable on the SRA’s Superexam.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority held a roundtable to discuss the latest news on the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE). Conveniently it was held at Leeds Beckett University so I didn’t have to go anywhere. Julie Brannan, Director of Education and Training at the SRA and Dr Eileen Fry, Director of the SQE at Kaplan who have been appointed to run the SQE ran the session.

I was hoping we might have a few more answers and I was hoping, against all hope I know, that things might not be as bad as I think they are. Hm. Anyway, let’s see if I can just tell you about it without actually raising my blood pressure. So Julie went first and outlined the SQE. There was nothing really new there. The usual 4 requirements come together in a puzzle, degree, SQE 1 and 2, character requirement and qualifying work experience. Julie confirmed that the requirements are not chronological. I’ve been thinking about this and while it might be true in terms of the regulation, logically they sort of are – or the logic of the SQE falls apart. If the degree or equivalent isn’t to come first then why have it at all? What would the point be of passing the SQE and doing the work experience and then do a degree… it’s odd. We also know that SQE 1 has to be taken before SQE 2. While the SRA say that the work experience can come at any point, they also say that the work experience only has to offer the opportunity to develop the skills required to be a solicitor because the SQE2 tests those skills. So logically then the chronology has to be degree, SQE1, Work experience, SQE 2 and the good character confirmation. Because if the work experience comes after SQE2 what’s the point of it given that the skills it is supposed to help develop have already been tested? I suppose what I am getting at is that the SRA talks about this being a really flexible pathway and you choose your own way through but in reality there are few pathways that make logical sense and when you start moving the order around the internal logic of the process falls apart.

So here’s where the blood pressure just won’t stay low:

Julie suggested that law firms currently use A-level grades to select candidates because they are the last reliable standardized test people take (She did say this was problematic because they were, at the time of application, old. This of course won’t change as A-levels are a way to filter out candidates and reduce the number of CVs an actual human has to look at – I have spoken several regional firms who use computer systems to filter out people so if you haven’t got three As your application will never actually be seen by a human… and if the SQE is pass/fail only then firms will still want to all back on something to rank them). So that’s a little annoying. There is the QAA Benchmark statement, we have external examiners, universities don’t just make it up as they go along, that’s before we look at the quite detailed rules about the LPC. That wasn’t the only worrying thing Julie said. She also said that the changes provided opportunities for education providers to ‘use their expertise to train their students for the SQE’. In other words the SRA is relying on university law schools to prepare students for an exam none of us really wanted in the first place.

So, about the exam itself – I was hoping for more information but really there was very little. Currently the thinking is that there will be 6 tests with 120 question each and the average time to answer the question was suggested to be about 1.8 minutes. That’s even worse than the 3 minutes previously talked about. Kaplan has paired up with Pearson to administer the test – there are lots of test centres across the country – apparently one within 40 miles of everyone. But that only applies to the written tests. The SQE2 tests will take place in far fewer centres because otherwise it’s too difficult to assure standardization and consistency.

I think the most shocking statement of the day was a response to a question about candidates with disabilities. Dr Fry said ‘You timetable for the bulk and then sort out the others’.  So if you have a disability which might prevent you from taking all the tests within the usual timetable, don’t worry, Kaplan will sort you out – nothing like making you feel like the profession is welcoming to all. I do wonder whether they’ve ever heard of inclusive assessment design. It was a throwaway comment but I can’t stop thinking about it.

But anyway, it’s ok because Kaplan staff are solicitors who therefore understand legal education and practice – yes the cause and effect was implied in that way. Of course being a solicitor means that you know everything there is to know about legal education. I’m sure there are some extremely well qualified people at Kaplan but these flippant imprecise comments don’t help! Kaplan have of course been running the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Test (QLTS) since 2011 and that’s part of the problem. The sample questions they shared with us on the day were clearly QLTS questions – they must have been because they had the passrate data from them. But the SQE is not the QLTS and even if it were a similar kind of thing, we seem to have forgotten that the QLTS is hugely problematic and that anecdotal evidence suggests it’s incredibly stressful and a fairly awful experience. Kaplan were keen to stress the expertise on their advisory board – drawn from people who have Bar exam experience as well as experience from medical education but again we’re not comparing like with like. I am sure there are things that can be learned from those contexts but we need to acknowledge that the SQE context is different.

Dr Fry spent some time talking about Validity, Reliability and Accuracy which is all good but the validity of the SQE seemed to completely undermined by another of her throw away remarks. If the SQE is supposed to test what solicitors need to know and be able to do on day one then we presumably need to know what solicitors do on day one – except we don’t and Dr Fry commented that one day we might do a survey to find out. So the SQE cannot test what it is supposed to test because we don’t know what solicitors do on day 1. It’s all a bit silly.

The other thing that struck me was that there is this presumption that law schools will offer preparation and that many many legal professionals still misunderstand the SQE as a new programme rather than as an assessment. This baffles me and I need to think carefully about what this means. There will of course be providers who will offer courses to prepare for the SQE. The courses will be unregulated and many won’t be that good and we will be leaving those least equipped to navigate that market to take a huge a risk.

Anyway, actually there’s nothing new! It’s the same old same old and we’re just waiting for the SRA to figure out fees, transition period, exact format of the SQE and anything else they think we might need to know. Lovely.