When the California Bar Board of Trustees took on the serious task of recommending a new cut score for the state’s infamously difficult exam, it did what most dedicated public servants do — it conducted a study and then punted responsibility to someone else. Yes, the venerable panel tasked with regulating the legal profession decided that it didn’t want to be in the business of the most basic element of regulating the legal profession, and asked the California Supreme Court to come up with an appropriate cut score based on a set of three recommendations ranging from “doing nothing” to lowering the score to 1390. That must be careful, thorough study to point to the unmistakeable conclusion of “I dunno.”

The California cut score controversy stirs up a good deal of emotion. Generally, lowering bar passage scores is a cheap effort by law schools to shuttle more graduates into the profession and provide a quick fix for their precious rankings. It’s important to hold the line against this behavior to protect prospective students from being duped into an expensive degree that they won’t be able to pay off — even if they technically earn a license. But California is a whole other can of worms. To call their current cut score out of whack would be an wild understatement. It’s no accident that the only state with a more aggressive cut score is the cloistered corporate shelter that is Delaware. Cut scores in this range are just naked protectionism, drawn up to keep the profession artificially small to the public’s disadvantage.

Which is why the deans of 20 of California’s ABA-accrredited law schools dropped a devastating missive on the state supreme court yesterday, asking them to throw away the bar’s study and get to work on a new review that isn’t plagued by methodological errors. And, of course, to lower the cut score in the meantime to bring it in line with the rest of the country — including New York, where lawyers seem to do just fine with a lower cut score.

Oh, is that all? Wow, what a mess. But more than a laundry list of methodological failings, the deans just point to the fundamental problem that bar exams say very little about whether or not a lawyer is competent. It’s a clichéd point, but remember Kathleen Sullivan failed this dumb exam!

Look, a cut score of 700 would let some pretty bad attorneys into the profession. But the idea that the national median would open the law up to dangerous undesirables is facile and insulting. It’s also, as the deans point out, quite racist.

The idea that the profession should loosen standards to improve diversity — recognizing that many diverse applicants will be lost for a variety of structural reasons — is a sensitive issue. Improving diversity will strengthen the profession in the long-term, but opportunistic schools will try to use this noble cause to ensnare more students in debt. There’s probably a sliding scale effort that could address these problems — there is for the LSAT after all. But here all California needs to do is put its cut score at the median to more than double the number of new African-American attorneys. Nothing special, no “affirmative action,” just recognizing that standards set up to protect the exiting order are likely to… protect the existing order.

As the deans conclude, would there be any evidence-based case for raising the score to 1440 if it currently sat at the national median? Hard to say there would be.

(Check out the whole letter on the next page.)

Earlier: Who’s To Blame For School’s ‘Horrific’ Bar Results? Maybe The California Bar Examiners.

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.