Are the official answers to the MBE ever wrong?
The answer to this has to be a “qualified yes.” Even though the MBE is exceptionally carefully prepared, sometimes questions don’t operate as the Bar Examiners expected them to. In order to compensate for this, the Bar Examiners use a process called “early item analysis.” The process works this way: immediately after each MBE is administered, the answer sheets of approximately 1,500 applicants in several different jurisdictions are quickly scored and analyzed. If a large number of the applicants who score the highest on the entire exam marked the wrong option to any particular question, then the official, “correct” answer is considered suspect. All suspect questions are sent back to the drafting committee that prepared them, and the committees then reexamine the questions. If they find that any question is confusing, they change the answer key in the following manner. In the rare cases where a committee finds that an entire question is faulty, everyone gets credit for his answer regard
