The 2023 administration of the bar exam may be in the rearview mirror, but now we’ve got some interesting data on which law schools came out on top when it came to their graduates’ pass rates.
As noted by Reuters, the American Bar Association recently released information concerning bar exam outcomes for the nearly 200 law schools it accredits. As we mentioned previously, the pass rate for first-time test takers inched up 79.18% in 2023, an increase over 2022’s 78% first-time pass rate. But which law schools truly did the best on the bar exam? Here are some additional details:
Ten of the 15 law schools with the highest 2023 first-time bar pass rates are in the so-called T-14, which are ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News & World Report. Five schools outside the T-14 also made that list….
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According to Reuters, these are the 15 law schools that were a cut above the rest when it came to their 2023 first-time bar exam pass rates:
- Michigan: 97.27%
- Chicago: 97.10%
- Vanderbilt: 96.97%
- Yale: 96.79%
- Stanford: 96.70%
- NYU: 96.58%
- UVA: 96.50%
- Penn: 96.25%
- Harvard: 96.10%
- BC: 95.88%
- BYU: 95.41%
- Duke: 94.44%
- Cornell: 94.29%
- Texas: 94.01%
- Utah: 93.98%
For reference, the T14 law schools that didn’t make the list here are Columbia (93.72%), Northwestern (91.60%), UC Berkeley (88.24%), and UCLA (88.82%).
Congratulations to all of the law schools that made the list!
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These US law schools had the highest bar pass rates in 2023 [Reuters]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked 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 and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.