What Goes Up Must Come Down (But Will You Know About It?)

On September 9, 2019, the National Conference of Bar Examiners posted an announcement on its website that the July 2019 scaled MBE mean score had rebounded. Legal news outlets pick up the NCBE announcement and published their own encouraging stories of July bar pass rates being poised to trend up after years of decline.

The NCBE wrote:

The national Multistate Bar Examination 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. 45,334 examinees sat for the MBE in July 2019, a nominal increase of one tenth of one percent (0.1%) compared to the 45,274 examinees who tested in July 2018.

The NCBE announcement came 40 days after the completion of the July 2019 bar exam.

Well, 40 days—actually, 52 days to be exact—have passed since the completion of the February 2020 bar exam, and the NCBE has made no splashy announcement about the February 2020 scaled MBE mean score as it did for the July 2019 score. Instead, the NCBE has quietly simply posted a graph on its website identifying the February 2020 scaled MBE mean score.

And it should be no surprise why the NCBE, which has been criticized among legal educators for its lack of transparency, hasn’t widely announced the February statistic.

The number isn't good.

Here's the graph the NCBE has published that indicates the February MBE mean scores from 2016 to 2020:

Source: https://thebarexaminer.org/statistics/

According to the published graph, the February 2020 MBE mean score was 132.6.

February MBE mean scores are generally lower than July MBE mean scores. So the 8.5 point difference between the July 2019 and February 2020 scores isn’t too surprising or unusual.

However, what is surprising is that this score represents not only a 1.4 point drop from the previous February administration in 2019, but it represents the lowest February scaled mean score over the past 10 February administration. The NCBE publishes historical data on scaled mean scores only as far back as 2009, so the February 2020 score could be the lowest score for a much longer period of time.

Here's a summary of the February MBE mean scores since 2009:

Source: https://thebarexaminer.org/statistics/

Isaac Newton is credited with saying, “What goes up must come down.” And that might be what's happening between the July 2019 and February 2020 scores.

Still, there’s another saying that we shouldn’t forget about: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

In other words, if scores on the MBE fall and no one reads about it, do we know what it means?

To give the NCBE the benefit of the doubt, it’s only been 52 days since the completion of the February 2020 bar exam, and maybe—maybe—the NCBE is still planning on releasing an explanation on the significant drop in the February 2020 scores. But for now, the NCBE's release of the score with a simple graph, and without a narrative, is disappointing.