It's not bad news: MBE scores rise for July 2020 bar exam
What a tepid title I can offer…. As longtime readers of this blog know, I track performance on the bar exam fairly closely. The July 2020 administration, however, offers only a limited window into what’s happening in legal education. Only some jurisdictions held a July 2020 bar exam; even in those jurisdictions, self-selection among test-takers this time around is probably not random (perhaps skewed toward better test-takers—those with ample resources to study and prepare, for instance).
So the NCBE’s update on performance on the July 2020 bar exam is of limited value. Scores went up. They went up a lot. In fact, they reached an all-time record high! It’s great news for those who took the July 2020 bar exam, of course! And pass rates will probably rise significantly in these jurisdictions that administered the exam.
Now, I won’t get overly excited about this chart—at least, I usually use this chart to make an overall evaluation of the state of legal education, and it really isn’t great to do that here. About 5700 test-takers took the July 2020 MBE. That’s compared to 45,000 or so in a typical July! (Removing New York alone, of course, accounts for 10,000 or so tests.) 5700 test-takers is a big sample, but it’s relatively a small cohort that tells us little about the overall state of legal education.
The MBE scores were up 5 points over July 2020, but they were up only 3.5 points over 2019 in the 23 jurisdictions that administered the July 2020 bar exam. That means if we added in other jurisdictions, we may well see a smaller spike.
Even within that cohort of states that administered a July 2020 exam, first-time test-takers were about 75% of all test-takers, about 6 points [I think] higher than the previous exam. So the pool of test-takers were stronger as it skewed toward first-time test-takers, which likely accounts for at least some of the improvement in scores. (It also suggests that those who failed the bar exam previously increasingly opted out of this administration of the exam.)
In short, this is terrific news for the crop of test-takers who did take the exam. (Not to mention those in the four states with some version of “emergency” diploma privilege this fall.) Maybe the absence of, say, weddings and night life meant limited travel and greater focus on studying for the exam as an additional contributing factor to success. One could only guess. But it probably doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the overall state of legal education and the cohort of recent law school graduates.