These Bar Exam Results Are Horrendous

A 41 percent passage rate is awful.

onMay 12, 2017 at 11:26 AMMay 12, 2017 at 11:30 AM

Pass Fail Exam Over the course of the past several years, instead of sunshine and happiness, springtime has brought terror and fear to many recent law school graduates. After all, they know that abysmal bar exam results will soon be released, and they pray that they’ll find their names on the list of those who managed to pass the test.

Those awaiting bar exam results in Arizona were right to be afraid, because today, the results from the state’s February 2017 administration of the bar exam dropped, and they are absolutely, positively horrifying.

According to a press release from the Supreme Court of Arizona’s Committee on Examinations, the overall passage rate for the February 2017 exam was just 41 percent. For the sake of comparison, let’s take a look at the results for the past few administrations of the Arizona bar exam. In February 2015, the overall passage rate was 58.8 percent. In July 2015, the overall passage rate was 56.6 percent. In February 2016, the overall passage rate was 49 percent.
In July 2016, the overall passage rate was 52.9 percent. Some test-takers have struggled to pass the Arizona bar exam for years, and as detailed on the AZ Courts Exam Statistics website, the passage rate for the February 2017 bar exam was once again the worst Arizona has seen in more than 10 years (and possibly even longer — the state’s website only goes back to the year 2005).

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Although Arizona has yet to release the school-by-school breakdown of its February 2016 passage rates, we can’t help but to wonder if Arizona Summit Law School, an institution that’s now notorious for dragging down the state’s bar exam passage rates, had something to do with Arizona’s terrible results. To date, two out of the three Infilaw schools — Charlotte School of Law and Florida Coastal School of Law — have posted passage rates of 25 percent for the February 2017 administration of the bar exam. Will Arizona Summit Law School complete Infilaw’s trifecta of failure? We’ll find out soon.

It would be incredibly embarrassing if Arizona Summit Law School’s graduates were behind the state’s worst bar-passage rate in more than a decade, but we unfortunately don’t have the statistics to support that hypothesis quite yet. We’ll have that information in a few days, but for the time being, we’d like to congratulate everyone who was lucky enough to have passed the Arizona bar exam. Less than half of your peers passed, so this is a special accomplishment.

Staci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.