States That Administered Two In-Person Bar Exams Have Seen Sharp Drops on Latter Exam (so far)
The National Conference of Bar Examiners recently announced that the national mean MBE scaled score for the Sept. 30-Oct. 1 bar exam was 137.2, which was a drop from 146.1 on the in-person July 2020 bar exam and from 142.7 on the in-person Sept. 9-10 bar exam. The early and late September exam dates were scheduled in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. (The NCBE also released testing materials for a remote bar exam administered on Oct. 5-6, but the MBE questions on those exams will be scored locally by the individual jurisdictions that administered them rather than the NCBE.)
A total of five jurisdictions, sitting a little more than 400 examinees, administered the MBE during this late September bar exam, including two jurisdictions—Alabama and Wyoming—that administered both the originally scheduled July 2020 in-person bar exam and the alternative late September test date.
The NCBE has warned that comparing these scaled scores to previous years’ national results for the July administration is of limited value, especially given the low examinee counts for the in-person administrations. However, it is interesting to compare the passage rates within the states who administered both the in-person July exam and one of the other alternative in-person exams, either in early September or late September, to illustrate just how impactful increases and decreases in national MBE scaled scores can be.
So far, only Alabama has publicly released bar passage statistics for both the July bar exam and the late September bar exam, and a comparison of these two exams indicates a sharp decline in bar passage rates as a result of the decline in national MBE scaled scores.
In Alabama, the overall bar passage rate dropped from 71.1% in July 2020 to 29.1% on the late September exam, for a difference of 42.0 percentage points. First-time passage rates took the hardest hit, plunging from 85.6% to 47.9% between the two exams. Repeat passage rates declined, too, but not as significantly—from 20.8% in July to 11.5% in September.
Comparison of Alabama Bar Passage Rates,
Washington is another jurisdiction that administered two in-person bar exams—one in July 2020 and another in early September. However, since Washington adopted the diploma privilege, only a few applicants actually sat for either of the bar exams. Only 71 applicants sat for the July exam, and 37 applicants sat for the early September exam. In 2019, 943 applicants sat for both exams.
Still, Washington saw a similar decline in bar passage rates between the two exams. A total of 85.9% of the examinees passed the July exam while only 37.8% of the examinees passed the early September exam, reflecting the decline in the national mean MBE scaled scores from July exam (146.1) to the early September exam (142.7).
Wyoming has not yet released publicly available statistics for the July 2020 and late September bar exams. Jurisdictions that have yet not released publicly available statistics for the July 2020 and early September bar exams include Kansas, Minnesota, and Nebraska.
