More than half of reporting states see drop in February bar pass rates
More than half of the states reporting results from February’s bar exam saw drops in overall pass rates, with most reporting a 50% or lower pass rate, according to statistics collected by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
Larger jurisdictions highlight the trend.
New York, which tested the second-highest number of bar examinees with 4,090 candidates, had a 39% pass rate, down from 42% a year earlier. Texas, where 1,088 people took the February test, also saw a drop, with 47% passing this February compared with 48% last February. In Illinois, 40% of the 754 candidates passed, compared with 44% a year ago.
The bar exam is given twice a year, and the February exam tends to have lower overall pass rates than the July exam. Typically, February attracts more candidates who have previously attempted and failed the exam, and repeat test-takers are more likely to fail, according to the NCBE.
Unlike most first-time examinees, who often are studying full time for the bar exam right after graduation, says Sean Silverman, owner of Silverman Bar Exam and LSAT Tutoring, “repeaters are often balancing studying with work, so they might have half the amount of time to dedicate to the exam. They need a longer time span to prepare, but they don’t.”
Only 18 of 44 states plus the District of Columbia that have posted at press time saw overall pass rates of 50% or higher. “That seems an important metric because it means that in such a large percentage of states, at least half of the students are not passing the exam,” Silverman adds.
That’s true even in Florida, where the pass rate jumped 5 percentage points to 46% from 41% last February. Florida has the third-highest number of February 2025 test-takers.
Oregon is the only state to match its February 2024 rate, with half of the February examinees passing.
In addition, February’s mean score for the Multistate Bar Exam, the multiple-choice portion of the widely used Uniform Bar Exam, fell to 130.8 from 131.8 a year earlier, according to the NCBE. This year, 15,350 people took the MBE, down from 19,496 in February 2024.
California, which tested about 4,200 candidates, launched its own bar exam in February without NCBE-created components. That decision impacted both the mean score and the number of test-takers.
“In four of the past five years, the MBE mean for California has been higher than the mean for the combined non-California jurisdictions,” said Bob Schwartz, NCBE managing director of psychometrics, in a news release, “so it makes sense that removing California from the national pool might bring the national mean down slightly.”
Even when California candidates are excluded from the 2024 statistics, bringing it to 131.5, the 2025 mean score still represents a 0.7 point drop from a year earlier.
California had planned to release its new test’s results May 2, but a variety of technical and logistical issues with the new exam—including last week’s disclosure that portions of the multiple-choice questions were written by nonlawyers using artificial intelligence—has delayed the announcement.
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