Bar Exams, Law Schools

This State Just Posted Its Worst Bar Exam Results In More Than A Decade

The results of this state's July 2016 bar exam are truly frightening.

By  
on

Pass Fail ExamWhen bar exam results season and Halloween season merge, the outcome is absolutely terrifying. Be prepared for a real scare, because the results from this state’s July 2016 administration of the bar exam were truly frightening.

According to a press release from the Supreme Court of Arizona’s Committee on Examinations, the overall pass rate for the July 2016 exam was just 53 percent. For the sake of comparison, let’s take a look at the results for the past two summer administrations of the Arizona bar exam. In July 2015, the overall pass rate was 56.6 percent. In July 2014, the overall pass rate was 68.3 percent. As detailed on the AZ Courts Exam Statistics website, the pass rate for the July 2016 bar exam is the worst summer pass rate Arizona has seen for more than 10 years — and possibly even longer (the state’s website goes back only to the year 2005). The state’s worst winter pass rate came this past February, with only 49 percent of test-takers passing the exam.

Although Arizona has yet to release the school-by-school breakdown of its July 2016 passage rates, given graduates’ incredibly poor performance generally, that didn’t stop our readers from speculating as to the cause of the overwhelmingly subpar results:

* “I’m disgusted, ashamed, and frustrated.”

* “From what I’ve heard, the first-time Arizona Summit pass rate is 21.7%.”

* “Want to bet which school screwed the pooch on the bar exam AGAIN?”

* “We are SICK of Summit grads making the entire state look like a bunch of window-lickers.”

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 (like they were for the state’s July 2015 and February 2016 results), but we unfortunately don’t have the information to support that hypothesis quite yet. If it’s true that AZ Summit Law graduates posted a 21.7 percent pass rate for first-time takers, it would be even worse than their performance on the July 2015 exam, where only 30.6 percent of first-time takers from the school passed the exam.

Congratulations to everyone who was lucky enough to have passed the Arizona bar exam. Barely half of your peers passed, so this is truly a special accomplishment.

Sponsored

Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , , , , ,