Law Schools

The Law Schools With The Best And Worst First-Time Bar Exam Pass Rates In 2017

Yikes! Some of these pass rates are absolutely horrendous.

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‘Oh my god, I failed the bar exam…’

For prospective law students, bar exam pass rates should be pretty close to the top of the list of things to research — right along with employment statistics and average graduate indebtedness — when deciding which law schools to apply to and which law school to eventually enroll at after being accepted. For the past few years, bar exam pass rates across the country have plummeted, and rather than making pre-law students continue to search each school’s website for important statistics on graduates’ bar pass rates, the American Bar Association recently decided to gather all relevant information and publish it in one place. How incredibly convenient!

All of the data is now available on one spreadsheet, and according to Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, it will “provide important consumer information for students considering whether and where to attend law school” — not to mention the fact that it will make it really easy for would-be law students to compare schools.

Not only does the ABA’s spreadsheet provide first-time bar pass rates for recent administrations of the exam, but it also provides a two-year “ultimate bar pass rate,” which ought to give students considering law school a more accurate picture of how a specific law school’s graduates fare on the exam.

For our purposes, the data allowed us to pick out the five law schools with the best first-time pass rates on the 2017 bar exam, and the five law schools with the worst first-time pass rates on the 2017 bar exam. For what it’s worth, 77 percent of 2017 law school graduates who took the bar passed on their first try. We’ll start with the law schools that did the best, and this list includes some of the usual T14 suspects.

  • Chicago: 98.58 percent passed on first try
  • Yale: 98.12 percent on first try
  • Duke: 97.65 percent on first try
  • NYU: 97.44 percent on first try
  • Harvard: 96.74 percent on first try

Nothing to see here, folks; these people are smart and they know it — they usually don’t have trouble passing the bar exam. Graduates from the five law schools with the worst first-time pass rates on the 2017 exam, well, that’s an entirely different story.

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  • U. District of Columbia: 40 percent passed on first try
  • Florida Coastal: 39.52 percent on first try
  • Whittier (RIP): 35.26 percent on first try
  • Thomas Jefferson: 29.17 percent on first try
  • Arizona Summit: 26.53 percent on first try

Yikes! This is why it’s so important to thoroughly research each and every law school during the application process, lest you waste up to six figures of federal loan dollars.

Do yourself a favor and click here to check out the Excel spreadsheet for yourself.

ABA Section of Legal Education releases comprehensive report on bar passage data [ABA News]
Avoid the Search: Law Schools’ Bar Pass Rates Now Found in One Spot [Law.com]

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Staci ZaretskyStaci 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, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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