The UBE Impact on Tennessee Bar Passage Rates, Part 2

Last May, after the release of the February 2019 Tennessee bar results, I examined the impact that the adoption of the UBE had on passage rates in Tennessee. (You read the prior blog here.)

Tennessee administered the Uniform Bar Exam for the first time in February 2019. It’s time for an update since the most recent administration of the Tennessee bar exam was also the state’s first UBE administration in July. More than 600 examinees sat for the July 2019 Tennessee bar exam compared to just 289 who sat for the February 2019 exam, which provides a larger data set to examine.

So, with results and statistics now released from Tennessee’s second administration of the UBE in July 2019, I have followed up my previous comparison of the February numbers with this discussion of the July numbers by comparing Tennessee’s first July administration of the UBE (July 2019) against the previous four July administrations (2015 to 2018).

A simple examination of the numbers reveal that the first July administration of the UBE in Tennessee was “easier” to pass than previous July administrations that I examined. After all, 80% of first-time test-takers passed the July 2019 bar exam, with nearly 71% of all examinees passing. The last time the state’s first-time bar passage rate was above 80% was July 2013, when the passage rate for first-timers was 84.01%.

But that’s not the whole story.

By comparing the UBE performance on the July 2019 UBE exam with the average performance on the three corresponding components—the MBE, the MPT, and the essays—of the prior make-up of the Tennessee Bar Exam, there was very little difference on the two written sections. What drove passage rates up across the board—overall, first-time, and repeat takers—were improved Multistate Bar Examination (multiple-choice) scores.

As the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced, the national MBE mean scaled score for July 2019 was 141.1, an increase of about 1.6 points from the July 2018 mean of 139.5. This increase is a rebound from the drop in the MBE mean score observed between July 2017 and July 2018 and marks the largest increase compared to the previous July’s mean since July 2008.

In Tennessee, the increase was even greater. The mean scaled score in Tennessee was 143.35 for the July 2019 exam—an increase of 2.61 points from the July 2018 mean in Tennessee of 140.74. And compared to the national mean, Tennessee examinees scored 2.25 points higher than all examinees.

While this increase of just a couple of scaled points might seem insignificant, it’s not.

Raw MEE and MPT scores are scaled based on scaled MBE performance—and this means that an improved mean scaled MBE score actually has a double impact on an applicant’s overall score because a higher mean scaled MBE also increases the mean scaled essay score.

So, even though the average scores on the MPTs and MEEs remained consistent (mostly because of how these are scored in Tennessee, as described in my prior post on the February 2019 results), passage rates increased because of higher MBE scores.

So my conclusion remains the same when I wrote my May blog post: the fact that the MBE drove the higher scores on the UBE indicates that Tennessee’s adoption of the UBE did not negatively or positively impact passage rates in Tennessee. The higher passage rate was driven by an increases in scores on the MBE, which retained the same content, structure, and component weight that existed prior to the adoption of the UBE.