Bar Exams

Surprise! Despite All Expectations To The Contrary, Bar Exam Scores Went Up This Year!

Bar exam test takers proved the experts wrong!

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test-anxietyWell, well, well. Would you look at that. The scores for the July 2015 administration of the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) were lower than they’ve been in almost three decades, and the head of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, Erica Moeser, was predicting that scores would only get worse.

Moeser, and plenty of other industry experts, believe that law schools’ declining admissions standards (i.e., accepting students with lower LSAT scores) is directly correlated to the bar exam passage rates. With those admissions numbers still on a downward trajectory, they expected the same for the MBE.

But they were wrong.

As reported by Deborah J. Merritt at Law School Cafe, the scores on the MBE went up for the July 2016 exam, by a small but significant amount:

Erica Moeser, President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, sent a memo to law school deans today. The memo reported the welcome, but surprising, news that the national mean score on the MBE was higher in July 2016 than in July 2015. Last year, the national mean was just 139.9. This year, it’s 140.3.

Of course this may not lead to significantly greater numbers of people passing the bar exam, and jurisdiction-specific details about the scoring have yet to be released, but Moeser did provide a few details in her memo to law school deans:

Moeser mentions in her memo that the mean MBE score increased in 22 jurisdictions, fell in 26, and remained stable in two. Teasing apart the jurisdictions will provide insights. School-specific results will be even more informative in exploring why the overall score rose.

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Merritt identifies four factors that she believes played a role in the score bump:

1. Schools improved preparation.
2. Graduates cared more.
3. Schools dismissed more students.
4. More graduates postponed the bar.

Not all of these are designed to help the students who have paid — or whose loan companies have paid — a lot of money to become practicing attorneys, but at least it is a start.

Surprise: MBE Scores Rise in 2016 [Law School Cafe]

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Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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