California Bar Results In Orange
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Is The California Bar Exam Hard? Yes, the California bar exam is widely considered to be the most difficult of all state bar exams in the US. The California bar exam has a pass rate of 34%.
For California ABA-accredited law schools, the pass rate for first time test-takers was 81%, up 5 percentage points from 2023. The State Bar of California reported today that 53.8 percent of applicants passed the July 2024 General Bar Examination (GBX).
Results are posted on the Applicant Portal. At p.m. on the day results are posted, applicants can also access the pass list on the State Bar website. Applicants who have failed the exam receive the grades assigned to their written answers as well as their MBE scaled score.
California is widely considered to have the hardest bar exam, due to its low pass rate and the difficulty of the content and constraints of the exam.
California's General Bar Exam pass rate of 53.8 percent is up from last year's July pass rate of 51.5 percent, and 2022's July pass rate of 52.4 percent. Preliminary statistical analyses show that of the 8,291 applicants who completed the GBX, 67.7 percent were first-time takers.
The 79.18% pass rate was up slightly from the 78% pass rate earned by first-time bar examinees in 2022, but lower than the 80% pass rate among 2021 takers and the 84% pass rate earned by 2020 examinees.
If you receive a score at or over 1440, you automatically pass the California bar exam. If, after one reading of your answers, your score is below 1390, you fail the California bar exam. If your score is 1390 or greater but less than 1440, you will get a “second read” by a different set of graders.
Notably, the most substantial disparity occurred in July 2022, with 36 percent of CALS graduates successfully passing the bar exam as first-time applicants, while only 13 percent of graduates from unaccredited schools achieved the same outcome.
The pass rate of California's bar exam has slightly increased since the state announced it would be lowering the cut score from 1440 to 1390 and spreading the exam over two days rather than three, but it is still widely considered the most challenging in the country.
California releases its bar exam results in two phases: first, to the individual exam takers, followed by a public release two days later. For those who took the exam in July 2024, California bar test results will be available on Friday, November 8, 2024, at p.m. (Pacific Standard Time.)
