By Xiumei Dong
Nearly 80 per cent of first-time test takers who sat for the bar exam in 2021 passed, a drop of about 3 percentage points from 2020, according to statistics released Tuesday by the American Bar Association.
The figure was part of a comprehensive set of data on bar passage outcomes released by the ABA managing director’s section of legal education and admissions to the bar, which compiled data from nearly 200 ABA-accredited law schools.
Per the report, 27,326, or nearly 80 per cent, of the 34,217 graduates who sat for the test for the first time passed last year. When taking into account 722 graduates with diploma privilege, which waives the need for a bar exam to practice in certain states, the overall percentage of graduates able to practice law reached slightly above 80 per cent — but still down from around 84 per cent the previous year.
“Consistent with last year, those admitted to the practice of law solely based on their graduation status are considered bar passers,” the ABA said.
Because the COVID-19 pandemic upended bar exam schedules across the country, a handful of jurisdictions, including Utah, Louisiana, the District of Columbia and Oregon, adopted some form of “diploma privilege” — automatic bar admission for qualifying graduates. Wisconsin has used the practice for decades.
The University of Wisconsin Law School and Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee had the most graduates with diploma privilege — 248 and 182, respectively — according to ABA data.
The University of Wisconsin Law School is also among the 39 ABA-accredited law schools that had at least a 90% first-time bar pass rate last year, with Harvard Law School leading the pack with a nearly perfect pass rate, the ABA data showed.
ABA’s data also tracked the two-year success rate in prior years, finding that in the aggregate, 91 per cent of 2019 law graduates who sat for a bar exam passed it within two years of graduation, slightly better than the 90 per cent figure for 2018 graduates.
Overall, about 95 per cent of the 2019 graduates took a bar exam within two years of graduating, the ABA said.
According to the report, the 2019 graduates of just two schools had a 100 per cent pass rate within two years: Marquette University Law School and Belmont University College of Law in Nashville.
The report also found that Georgetown University Law Center had the most 2019 graduates and that 96 per cent, or 621, of its 644 graduates sat for the bar and passed within two years of graduation.
Bill Adams, managing director of ABA accreditation and legal education, said in a statement that the information was reported to the ABA by law schools and was being made public as a matter of consumer information under the authority of ABA Standard 509. ABA-accredited law schools were able to obtain bar passage information from 99 per cent of all graduates.
“These public reports provide important consumer information for students considering whether and where to attend law school and for others with an interest in legal education,” Adams said, noting that the data is not a compliance report on whether schools attained the bar exam outcomes needed for ABA accreditation.
–Editing by Karin Roberts.
