Bar Exams

FIRST? North Carolina Bar Exam Results Are OutIs NC the fastest state when it comes to grading bar exams?

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Over the weekend, we received several messages about results for the North Carolina bar exam, which went out by snail mail on Friday. Here’s one email a Carolinian reader sent us:

NC Bar Results were mailed out on Friday… thought you might want to start an open thread or something? I don’t know.

Hmm, we don’t know either. We traditionally post open threads on bar exam results for the biggest states, like New York and California, but we don’t do them for every state. No offense to our many readers from smaller states; we just aren’t inclined to do 50 posts about bar exam results, two times a year.

But we’ll make an exception for North Carolina, since it’s the first state we’ve heard about that has released bar exam results from the July 2010 administration. A question to our readers: Is NC the FIRST state to do so? If you know of a state that released its July 2010 results before this past Friday, August 27, please email us (subject line: “[State] Bar Exam”).

UPDATE: From a reader: “NC is usually the first state to release results, and they typically take 4 weeks. Page 22 of this guide (PDF) has the typical results times for each state.”

How was Carolina able to grade the bar exams so quickly?

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It’s mainly a function of the numbers, we suspect. According to the North Carolina Board of Law Examiners, only 1,046 applicants completed this July’s bar exam. Compare this to the July 2009 New York bar exam, which was taken by a record 11,532 candidates.

UPDATE: Additional explanations for North Carolina’s grading speed appear in the comments.

Of course, there are other states with similarly small applicant pools that have not yet graded their bar exams. So props to NC for handling this process so expeditiously. As one of our Carolina tipsters told us, “It is ridiculously fast — all of my friends in other states are very jealous.”

Indeed. Waiting around for bar exam results — especially in this tough job market, where bar passage could mean the difference between gainful employment and the absence thereof — provokes a great deal of anxiety. And many of you aren’t doing bar trips this year, meaning that you don’t have any travel to distract you while you wait.

Congratulations to everyone who passed the North Carolina bar exam!

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P.S. If you have a friend or law school classmate who sat for the North Carolina bar exam, you can look them up on the NC website after noon on Wednesday, September 1st.

Board of Law Examiners of the State of North Carolina [official website]

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