Will Missouri Supreme Court drop pass score for July bar exam?
The Association of Academic Support Educators is asking the Missouri Supreme Court to drop the pass score and reimburse bar applicants who took the July 2026 NextGen Uniform Bar Examination after facing disruptions during the inaugural administration of the skills-based exam designed to be taken by a personal computer.
At the Columbia, Missouri, examination site July 28, test-takers on the first day faced a long delay, with some waiting several hours before they could start, as well as a modified schedule the second day to make up for lost time, according to the Aug. 17 letter by the AASE, a nonprofit member organization for law school academic support professionals.
Last week, the state supreme court acknowledged the problems.
“The disruption was not due to either the NextGen examination itself or its testing platform,” according to an Aug. 11 statement from the state supreme court, and it “recognizes these interruptions are unacceptable and added enormous stress for applicants taking the exam.”
In the AASE’s letter to the court, the group requests that the court drop the passing score by five points, from 610 to 605; reimburse applicants for costs caused by the delayed administration; and publicly share the findings of its ongoing review of the test. The letter, signed by Elizabeth Z. Stillman, the president of the AASE, noted that Hawaii, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington “each temporarily lowered their passing scores in 2020” after “pandemic-related testing disruptions.”
“It is very reasonable for the court to consider a one-time score modification under the circumstances, especially when precedents have already been set,” Marsha Griggs, an associate professor at the St. Louis University School of Law and a former president of the AASE, told the ABA Journal. “It could offer some reassurance to Missouri applicants.”
With the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ sunsetting of the in-person, live-proctored Uniform Bar Exam, the use of paper and pencil for the multiple-choice portion is going too. Instead, the NextGen UBE is entirely conducted via the examinees’ personal computers at locations selected by the jurisdictions.
Missouri was not the only jurisdiction that experienced tech troubles on launch day. Washington had to cancel the July administration, with that state’s supreme court ultimately offering some candidates diploma privilege.
In an email to the Journal, Stillman pointed out that while the Missouri candidates’ disruption “was not as severe as their Washington counterparts, they suffered nonetheless.”
“We hope the court will be inclined to provide them an appropriate and reasonable remedy,” she added.
Stillman noted that the court had not responded to the AASE’s letter.
The Missouri Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment from the Journal.
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