Extreme values can make the calculator go haywire. High scoring examinees generally pass so I never see their essay scores which would help me improve the calculator. On the UBE, the most you can receive for a single MEE answer is 20 UBE points (5% of 400), but with my F18 NY calculator, this occurs with a scaled essay score of 78. Meanwhile, I am aware of examinees who have scored higher than a 78 on the essays, so something else is going on that I don’t fully understand. For the NY UBE, a simple rule of thumb is a score of 20 if you wrote nothing and a score of 80 for a top 99th percentile answer (although this vary by +/- 10).John--- wrote:Joe (or anyone else who might know the answer): The maximum scaled score I can enter in your calculator for MEE is a number around 67? And 85 for MPT? https://seperac.com/zcalc-ube-f18.php
Post-exam worrying about the essays is not productive. For example, the day before the July 2016 UBE exam, a subscriber (foreign examinee) emailed me the following: “You’re probably being swamped by panicking students today (including me), so I understand if you don’t have time to respond. Basically, I’m considering withdrawing from the exam and re-sitting in February because I feel very, very underprepared for the essays portion of the test.” I told this subscriber that it would be a mistake to withdraw (everyone feels unprepared for the exam). The examinee sat for the exam and ended up passing with a 177.9 scaled MEE/MPT score (MBE score of 148.1 and total score of 326). A written score of 177.9 places this examinee’s MEE/MPT scores in the 99.8% percentile among examinees nationwide (meaning just 0.2% of last year's examinees nationwide scored better than this examinee on the MEE/MPT). I later found out that this examinee wrote the 2nd released above average answer to Essay #4 (Secured Transactions), meaning this examinee wrote the highest scoring essay #4 out of 10,296 examinees. Being the highest scoring examinee on the Secured Transactions essay, this examinee received an estimated scaled score of 85 on that essay. This means the examinee needed to average 62 on the remaining essays/MPTs in order to score a 177.9 on the MEE/MPT. In contrast, the failing examines who sent me their J16 scores averaged 44 on the MEE questions and 43 on the MPT questions. So basically, a 180-185 is generally the most you can score on the MEEs/MPTs and MBE, meaning a maximum of 370/400 total score. To date, the highest score I’ve ever received from a UBE examinee is 355 (171 MBE, 184 written).
Bottom line, you never know what to expect on the written portion of the exam. Even if you feel “very, very underprepared for the essays portion of the test” as this examinee did, you can still score well on the essays/MPT. Sometimes it is luck (topics you had prepared for appeared) and sometimes it is unexplainable (essay grading is a very nebulous thing).