To help examinees better understand the NY bar exam essays/MPT, I created an Essay/MPT comparison report. This analysis examines a collection of essays/MPTs and looks through them for matching words in phrases (minimum of 3 words). The reports contain the document text with the matching phrases underlined. The reports also show PDFs of the two essays you selected side-by-side. Put simply, examinees learn by example - reviewing a collection of graded essays helps you better understand the New York essays/MPT. I find this essay/MPT comparison to be incredibly useful to examinees. For example:

• You can compare an essay to any of the other examinees essays or the above average answers.
• You will see exactly what NYBOLE considers to be a passing essay. You can then compare your essay to passing essays (for example, above a 50.44 scaled score on the February 2010 exam or above a 46.81 scaled score on the July 2010 exam).
• You can compare an essay to the best essay, the worst essay, or essays with scores with similar scores (and sometimes exactly the same score).
• You can learn how much (or how little) is written for high scoring essays.
• In the Text comparison, you can see exactly what words an essay used that the comparison essay also used.
• In the PDF comparison, you can compare the the style, layout, penmanship, neatness of essays.
• You can compare handwritten essays to typed essays.
• You can divine other useful information (for example, for the July 2010 exam, I have essays from two examinees in seat # sequence. It is likely that these essays were graded by the same grader one after the other. Comparing the essays/grades may give a better understanding of what the grader was thinking when the grader assigned the grades).

I feel this analysis is invaluable for examinees to discover "what works" versus "what doesn't work." For example, you can use the Text comparison to compare high scoring essays/MPTs to the released above average answers to see what phrases both essays shared. I am in the process of examining the essays to see if I can determine (with reasonable confidence) if anything other than an essay's content has a bearing on the essay's score. For example, does penmanship, neatness, headings, or mis-spellings have any effect on an examinee's final score?

To maintain the anonymity of the examinees, all identifying information has been redacted and each examinee is assigned a random 3-digit ID. If your browser is Internet Explorer or Firefox, if you type Ctrl+F and then search based on an ID, each instance will be highlighted (in Firefox, you must press the "Highlight All" button). This is an easy way to find all the instances of an examinee's essays to compare to other essays. In both browsers, you can choose to have new windows open in Tabs (under Internet Options in Internet Explorer or Options in Firefox). This will prevent new windows from being created and keeping all the comparisons in organized tabs.

In the Essay/MPT analysis, each and every essay is compared to every other essay. There are three columns on the report - a "Matching Words" column, a "Text Comparison" column, and a "PDF Comparison" column.

The "Matching Words" column reports the number of perfectly matching words that have been marked in the pair of documents. It includes too-short phrases that require bridging over non-matching words in order to count as matching between the two documents. Each "Matching Words" row item has 3 subparts: (a) the number of matching words; (b) what percentage of the first document is accounted for by these matching words; and (c) what percentage of the second document is accounted for by these matching words.

The "Text Comparison" column shows the text matches between the two essays you select. In the reports, perfect matches are indicated by red-underlined words and bridging, but non-matching words are indicated by green-italicized-underlined words. The matching phrases are links. If you click on a matching phrase, you will be taken to the equivalent phrase in the other document of the pair.

The "PDF Comparison" column shows the PDFs of the two essays you select side-by-side.

In the tables, the hyperlink naming convention operates as follows:
Exam-Essay-Score-Typed or Written-ID

For example, the naming convention "Feb 2010-MPT 01-Score 36.50-Typed-ID 006" means that this is an essay from the February 2010 exam, it was written in response to the MPT, the scaled score of the essay/MPT was 36.50, the examinee typed the essay, and the randomly generated ID of the candidate was 006. You can use the ID to differentiate examinees in instances where multiple examinees have the same score on an essay.

In a few instances, the Typed/Written status of an essay is "Typed Edited." This means that the essay is a typed essay, but it is not in it's original format because the examinee edited it. For these essays, you must keep in mind that what you are seeing may not be exactly what the bar grader saw in regards to layout or format.

If the essay is an above average answer released by NY BOLE, in place of an ID, the following appears:
NYBOLE-Above Average Answer 1
NYBOLE-Above Average Answer 2

Please note that these released above average answers do not have scores, but it would be safe to say these essays received a score between 65-80.

In this small sample, there are 28 comparisons based on the MPTs of six examinees (plus the two released above average answers). For the July 2010 exam, for each essay/MPT, there are 1,378 comparisons based on 51 examinee essays and the two released above average answers, resulting in a total of 8,268 comparisons.