The July 2015 New York Bar Exam Results Are Out!

Congratulations to everyone who passed!

Kudos to the New York Board of Law Examiners for sparing law school graduates the extra agony and releasing bar exam results earlier and earlier (a trend we noted last year). In 2013, the July exam results came out on October 30. In 2014, the July exam results came out on October 28. This year, the July exam results came out… this morning! (Or even late last night, depending on when you got the email, but the letter bears today’s date.)

As reported by the New York Law Journal:

The New York State Board of Law Examiners will release the results of the July 2015 bar examination Tuesday.

The board will inform test-takers and make the passage rates publicly available. The results will be posted on the Law Journal website Tuesday at about midnight and in the print edition Wednesday.

So you’ll have to wait a little bit to see which friends of your passed and which ones did not. If you surf over to the NY BOLE website, the full list of names is not yet available; all you can do is privately look up your own results.

We heard anecdotal reports of the New York bar exam being especially difficult this year. Will the Empire State join the list of jurisdictions posting unusually low pass rates for July 2015? It’s too early to say because New York hasn’t released aggregate data yet on bar exam passage rates. Last year, as noted by the NYLJ, the pass rate for the 11,195 first-time takers was 83 percent, down from 86 percent in the prior year.

UPDATE (11:58 a.m.): Yikes. The passage rate for the July 2015 administration is the lowest it has been in years.

Here are some reactions from ATL readers to the results:

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  • “The exam results just dropped. I got my e-mail at 11:56 PM, my heart clenched, and I read the results, then literally jumped for joy.”
  • “I’m still not sure how, but I passed the New York bar!”
  • “I’d like to congratulate myself for passing the NY State Bar exam. Good sign for my Mets tonight.”
  • “I passed. I’m now wondering if the pigeons who were in the Javits Center for the test also passed.”

Let’s hope not — there’s already more than enough competition for lawyer jobs out there.

Ah yes, the next hurdle for many law school graduates: finding full-time, long-term employment as a lawyer. It’s not easy, but it’s a heck of a lot easier after you’ve passed the bar; many employers, especially smaller firms, wait for this day before hiring. So congratulations to everyone who passed, and good luck to everyone hunting for a job.

If you didn’t pass, don’t despair. Many very successful people, including one leading presidential candidate, have failed the bar exam (see our list of famous bar exam failures). Just shift your focus to February and develop a plan for passing.

Feel free to celebrate your good news (or bemoan your failure) in the comments. Once again, congrats to all who passed!

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(If you’re interested, you can flip to the next page to see the letter that bar exam passers just received.)

State Bar Exam Results to Be Released Tuesday [New York Law Journal]

Earlier: As Bar Exam Scores Continue To Plummet, Early Results Reveal Worst Performance In Decades
Ask The Professor: What Happens If You Fail The Bar Exam?
OMG, The 2014 New York Bar Exam Results Are Out!
The Bar Exam: A List of Famous Failures