Tomorrow marks the first day of the July 2017 bar exam, and for the first time ever, the California bar exam will be administered in a two-day format. In the past, the state’s exam was administered over the course of three torturous days, and by the end of the affair, law school graduates were left battered, bruised, and broken by the notoriously difficult exam.
The first day of California’s new exam format will include five one-hour essays and a 90-minute performance test. The second day will be spent on the Multistate Bar Exam, a 200-question multiple-choice test. Both days will be weighed equally in determining a test-taker’s score.
In recent years, the pass rate for the California bar exam has been alarmingly low — the pass rate for the February 2017 exam was just 34.5 percent — but that hasn’t deterred law school graduates from signing up to enter the arena and do battle with the test. In fact, thanks to the exam’s new format, law school graduates have rushed to send in their applications to take the test in a stampede. How many people will sit for this summer’s bar exam in California?
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According to The Recorder, more than 10,000 people applied to sit for the July 2017 exam, which is jaw dropping. Here’s some additional information:
Applications to take the July bar exam topped 10,000 this year—an increase of more than 1,000 above July 2016’s numbers, according to figures released by the state bar. Requests to take the general bar exam are up by 499 to 7,981. The number of out-of-state lawyers who applied to take next week’s test surged to 2,051, up from 1,549 this time last year. …
The bar has reported a year-over-year jump in the number of “immediate repeaters,” or those who failed the February exam, from 2,387 to 2,485. …
Not every applicant will actually sit for the test. As of Tuesday, exam administrators had deemed 29 registrants ineligible—for failing to meet certain legal education requirements—to take the test. Another 194 had withdrawn their applications. Still, a potential 9,837 exam-takers would mark the highest turnout in more than a decade.
Please keep in mind that just because the exam is one day shorter doesn’t mean it will be any easier. Stay positive, stay strong, and if you’re feeling down about the likelihood that you’ll pass the exam, just remember that if and when the California Supreme Court sets a new, more reasonable cut score for the exam, it may be retroactively applied to the July 2017 bar exam. Best of luck!
Who Says California’s Bar Exam Is Too Tough? [The Recorder]
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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.