February bar exam pass rate is record low

The 27.3 percent pass rate on the February 2018 California bar exam was the worst result on record and came just two years after a 32-year low on the July test.

The historically poor performance also came on the second administration of a two-day, rather than three-day, test.

While the first shortened exam produced an improved success rate last summer, the bar reported Friday evening that just 1,282 of the 4,701 people who completed the February test passed.

“It’s disheartening for both the bar and law schools,” said Derek T. Muller, a professor at Pepperdine University School of Law. “There are a lot of graduates who graduated with a J.D. from an accredited school who will not be practicing law this year.”

The previous low for the overall success rate on any administration of the California bar was 27.7 percent in the spring of 1983, according to bar statistics dating back to 1951.

Muller noted that while first-time takers passed the most recent test at the same 39-percent clip as they did last year, repeat takers saw their success rate fall from 33 to 23 percent.

Repeaters typically make up a large percentage of the February exam takers, resulting in the winter test featuring lower pass rates and a smaller number of applicants than the July exam.

First-time takers from American Bar Association-accredited schools in California passed this February’s test at a 46-percent rate, up one percentage point from last year and 11 percentage points better than such takers from out-of-state ABA schools.

But repeaters from in-state ABA institutions, a category that outperformed first-timers last February, saw their success rate plummet from 46 percent to 31 percent.

“This is really getting kind of out of control,” said Niels B. Schaumann, dean of California Western School of Law in San Diego.

The declining bar results have come as the incoming credentials of law students have fallen in recent years.

Schaumann and other deans highlighted that once again California test-takers outperformed the nationwide average on the national, multiple-choice section of the test.

The California average on the multistate exam administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners was 1,355, the bar reported, compared to 1,328 nationwide. The national average was the lowest it had been in more than a decade.

“The low [California] results mirror what happened in most jurisdictions in February — there were a large percentage of repeat test takers who drove down the mean and the pass rates,” Judith A. Gundersen, president of the national conference, wrote in an email.

Law school deans had pointed to the multiple-choice results last year in their call for the California Supreme Court to lower the passing standard on the state’s bar exam, which is the second highest in the nation, behind Delaware.

The court was presented with two options by the bar for reducing the cut score or keeping the current standard. The court decided last fall to maintain the status quo.

Schaumann and Mitch Winick, dean of state-accredited Monterey College of Law, said the February results demonstrated the urgent need for a lower passing score they believe should have already been implemented.

“Lives are being ruined by a stubborn effort to hold on to an invalid standard that does not meet the legal statutory requirement of measuring the ‘minimum competence for the first-year practice of law,’” Winick wrote in an email. “It is a shameful act by the bar and the court to perpetuate this myth of fairness or honesty in the face of statistical proof that the system is faulty and needs urgent change.”

Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, chief justice of the state Supreme Court, declined to comment on the bar results.

First-time takers from state-accredited schools saw their pass rate rise from 18 to 23 percent. For California’s unaccredited schools, the first-time success rate was 33 percent at fixed-facility institutions, 24 percent at distance learning schools and 14 percent at correspondence schools.

The bar has yet to release the results for individual schools.

State Bar Executive Director Leah T. Wilson highlighted that the agency has launched a “Productive Mindset Intervention Program” to boost performance on the July exam.

Such interventions aim to have participants see challenges they encounter while studying as learning opportunities rather than failures and to focus their attention on areas that should lead to success. More than 1,700 applicants have registered for the initiative, Wilson said.

“Through this program and ongoing study, we hope to better understand the downward trend of bar exam pass rates,” she said in a statement.

Schaumann, of California Western, said the project was worth a shot.

“More often than people imagine, it is not cognitive issues that interfere with bar performance, it is attitudinal issues,” he said.

The bar is also preparing to undertake a “California Attorney Job Analysis Study” to determine the skills and knowledge entry-level attorneys should possess. The agency said the results will inform future decisions about the content, format and passing standard for the 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.