My friend Mark will soon be taking the ethics portion of the Illinois State Bar Exam, in the form of 50 A-D multiple choice questions. To pass, he will need about 32 right. 32/50 on a multiple choice test! That's a 64%! That's a D! And that doesn't sound like too high a bar to set for the lawyers in the great state of Illinois.
Of course, what you are now wondering is this: what are the odds of just guessing your way to a passing score? It's pretty apparent that you have a pretty good chance of getting 12 or 13 correct. That would be 1/4. And your odds of getting 10 or more right is 83.6%. But it's a lot tougher to improve beyond those meager scores than you'd think. Your odds of getting 20 or more correct drop down to 1.4%. But still, that's about 1 in 72. Which means that in a room full of 72 monkeys, trained to take multiple choice tests, we would expect 1 monkey to get 20 or better. Or, if you could get a 20/50, you would be as smart as about 72 monkeys.
But we haven't answer the question yet of how many monkeys to pass the test. Well, the problem with the probabilities on things like this, is that no matter how much you think the bottom has fallen out on your odds, it keeps falling out even faster than before. Your odds of getting 25 right are only ~ 1 in 8,162. That's a lot of monkeys. Getting to 30 requires 6,100,000 monkeys. And to get those extra two measly questions, we would have to add another 142.5 million monkeys to our room. That's a lot of #2 pencils.
And to get a perfect score? You guessed it, you'd have to be as smart as 1,260 billion billion billion monkeys.
7 comments:
Definitely one of your more interesting posts :)...
My sister took the Illinois bar in July and is now working for Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago. Do you know where your friend will be working?
Only you, Clark :)
"And that doesn't sound like too high a bar to set for the lawyers in the great state of Illinois."
Starting a sentence with "and" is being grammatically lazy.
Anonymous - in case you hadn't noticed, this is a conversational blog, not the AP Syle Manual.
Suzanne,
By AP Syle Manual, do you mean the Associated Press young herring Manual? Or were you in fact attempting to say the APA Style Manual? See, even in a "conversational" blog the rules of spelling and grammar are important so readers know what you are talking about. Thank you for illustrating my point so effectively.
Sometimes "grammatically lazy" is a deliberate (and perfectly legitimate) style choice.
If imperfect spelling and grammar equates to "can't tell what the writer is talking about" then how do you manage to decipher political cartoons? Comic books? Dave Barry? Mark Twain?
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