Today the State Bar of California released the results of the February 2018 California Bar Exam, and announced that 1,282 people (27.3 percent of applicants) passed the General Bar Exam. If those applicants satisfy all other requirements for admission, they will be eligible to be licensed by the State Bar to practice law in California.
"I warmly congratulate the 1,282 applicants who passed the latest California Bar Exam. I also want to acknowledge a low overall pass rate," said Leah T. Wilson, Executive Director of the State Bar of California. "In order to help improve performance on the bar exam, we recently launched the Productive Mindset Intervention Program. Through this program and ongoing study, we hope to better understand the downward trend of bar exam pass rates."
The mean scaled Multistate Bar Examination score on the February 2018 General Bar Exam in California was 1,355; the national average was 1,341.
The Productive Mindset Intervention Program will be available to applicants beginning with the July 2018 Bar Exam. This program is a partnership with researchers at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Indiana University. The program is designed to improve exam performance across the board, with a particular boost for people of color and women. More than 1,700 applicants who are registered for the July 2018 California Bar Exam have registered for the program.
After historically low passage rates last year, the State Bar commissioned California’s first-ever comprehensive series of studies of the bar exam, including a review of the passing score and whether the content of the bar exam is appropriate to test the knowledge and skills needed by entry level attorneys. Based on the information available, no changes to the passing score or the content of the exam were adopted.
The State Bar is now preparing to undertake a California
attorney job Analysis Study to collect information about the knowledge and skills that entry level attorneys need. The study results will provide the foundation for future evaluation of the content, format, and pass line of the California Bar Exam.
"Over the long term, we need to be sure that we are testing for the skills and content that new attorneys need, and that we are doing so in the right format," Wilson said.
Preliminary statistical analyses from the February 2018 General Bar Exam:
4,701 applicants completed the exam
1,267 (27 percent) were first-time applicants
The passing rate for first-time applicants was 39 percent overall
3,434 applicants were repeat applicants
The passing rate for repeat applicants was 23 percent overall
Passing rate (rounded to whole numbers) by law school type:
School Type
First-Timers
Repeaters
California ABA
46%
31%
Out-of-State ABA
35%
27%
California Accredited (but not ABA)
23%
9%
Unaccredited: Fixed-Facility
33%
5%
Unaccredited: Correspondence
14%
13%
Unaccredited Distance Learning
24%
5%
All Others
43%
19%
All Applicants
