Yeah but knowledge of laws and how they apply is only a very small fraction of the actual job of being an attorney. It's a test to make sure that you understand the legal framework but it says nothing about your actual ability to be a good lawyer. I mean, there's already plenty of well-known cases of totally incompetent lawyers being out there who have passed the bar exam technically. So I guess people probably never considered it to be a test of actual job aptitude, but more of just a basic knowledge of law and the legal framework. But I don't really know anything about law so this is just speculation really

A big issue with it is that it is really only relevant to a segment of lawyers - state law generalists. The sort of lawyer who you go to to get a will, sue for a slip and fall, set up your llc, and represent you for your dui.

That is one of the larger groupings of lawyers, but its one of a ton of different groupings. And now more than ever, most lawyers specialize. The bar does nothing for lawyers in the transactional field (think drafting contracts and other business documents), and nothing for those in the regulatory world (when government agencies say you or your company needs to do something and you won't go to jail for refusing or breaking their rules but you'll pay money). The bar is focused on litigation the third major discipline, but also again focuses on specific state law, not federal law issues, or any of the many subjects not tested. In effect, you could take someone who spends their whole life as a professional contract negotiator and writer, someone at the absolute top of their profession, put them through law school, and whether they could continue to do their job as a lawyer, would be based on shit like their knowledge of divorce laws and criminal law court procedure. I'm in an office of 30, in a practice area of probably a few thousand nationwide, and what we do every day isn't tested anywhere. What value does it provide us?

Theres also the issue that you don't practice like you take the bar. Bar prep is a 2 month intensive, full time study process where you memorize as much as you can about a bunch of subjects, and then write about them and take a multiple choice test about all 15+ subjects.

In reality, the only time that I have had to know something in advance, without time to do prep research, was in a natural disaster with lives on the line. And it wasn't a bar exam subject, which are all pretty slow moving and routine subjects that wouldn't save or cost lives in a disaster.