Law Schools

Bar Exam Scores Dip... Time For Everyone To Freak Out!

Just how bad is this gonna get?

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As we approach judgment day on the most recent COVID-era bar exam, the news is more than a little bleak. Good thing we’ve got surging transmission rates in large swaths of the country so we can be sure to keep doing this!

Among the panoply of indignities suffered by bar examinees, it may not be the most egregious, but it’s always a delightful detour through through the woodchipper when the MBE statistics come out before applicants have seen their final results. Yesterday, the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced that MBE scores were slightly down from 2019 — the last “normal” bar exam year — and then promptly went back to swim in their money bin while examinees gently rocked back and forth muttering “… it must vest, if at all, not…” until the quaaludes take over.

The good news is that the NCBE’s figures aren’t that bad. Lisa Young, Kaplan’s executive director of academics for bar prep programs said:

A fluctuation of .7 on the Multistate Bar Exam is not all that significant and not inconsistent with the fluctuations over the last ten years. That data point in itself is nothing to necessarily be concerned about.

Phew. That’s good news, hopefully we can all get back to… oh wait, Young had more to say:

The more important data point is the drop in the overall bar passage rate we’re seeing in almost all the states that have already released this information — and some of these drops are quite large. These have been incredibly challenging and unique examination cycles because of a host of factors, including online learning and technical glitches on bar exam day, none of which likely helped student performance.

Oh crud.

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Yes, there are some overall drop offs coming in and while it may not be fair to brush with the usual broad strokes in a country where about half the jurisdictions were online and half were in person, it’s more likely than not that these aren’t raging outliers.

Karen Sloan wrote in Reuters:

North Carolina’s overall pass rate dropped to 75%, down from 83% in July of 2020 — and that’s with the state officials lowering the passing score by two points this year in response to technical problems encountered by some who took the online exam. Iowa’s pass rate dropped 12 percentage points year over year, landing at 71% this July. New Mexico’s pass rate is down 18 percentage points, to 71%, while Nebraska’s plummeted 17 percentage points, to 72%. South Dakota is the lone increase thus far, picking up three percentage points to land at 73%.

Maybe the larger states will buck the trend? These tend to be states that were suffering the worst from resurgent COVID over the summer, so maybe the states that were ahead on the important metric of “not bathing examinees in a toxic cloud” brought out better performances. We’ll see.

Back to Young:

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The most important thing that those of us in the legal education community can do is give students a quality learning experience that will help them pass the bar and become practicing attorneys.

True. Well, the most important thing we can do right now, I suppose. The most important thing we can do overall is push for a hard crackdown on accreditation that could create a law school system that leaves the public assured that every graduate is automatically competent to practice law and end the cycle of bleeding students for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then leaving them jobless on the back end, but that’s another story.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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