What are my chances of passing the bar?

This is a question virtually every law student asks him or herself, but there are surprisingly few answers available.

On the one hand, most students know they can look to the bar passage rate of their own law schools, taking into account their class rank, to have some sense of how likely they are to pass the bar in the law school's home state. If the law school has a 70% passage rate, then it's likely you will have at least an 70% chance of passing if you're in the top half of the class. However, even that's not mathematically certain; it all depends on how closely law school grades correlate with bar passage at each individual school, which is not information that most schools make public.

Moreover, suppose you are trying to decide where to take the bar and you would like to know where you would have a decent chance of passing the first time. In that case, you will not even have your own school's bar passage rate to refer to. It turns out that state bar exams vary wildly in their difficulty, although few people talk openly about the differences. I suppose it's considered bad manners to point out that the same student who would have a 30% chance of passing the California bar exam might have an 70% chance of passing the bar examination in another state. But given the delay, disappointment, and cost that failing the bar imposes on recent graduates, I think it's important information students need to know.

This is why I developed my experimental bar passage calculator. It was clear from my prior posts on bar exam dificulty here and here that there is a need for more information on this topic. This bar examination calculator designed to predict the probability of passing a particular state bar examination based on LSAT, law school class rank, law school ranking, and bar examination state. This is an EXPERIMENTAL version of the calculator because it has not been validated against enough reliable, recent data. As a result, it may not give accurate predictions unless and until law schools provide me with data to calibrate and validate its predictions. I will revise this calculator as more information becomes available to me, but for now this should be considered provisional.

I am making the calculator public to solicit help from those who have reliable data, such as law school administrators (if you are an academic support professional or other administrator in a law school, please see note below). Please report any bugs you encounter using the calculator by email or in the comments. Note that Louisiana, Washington (state), and Michigan have been removed because significant recent changes to their bar exams make older data obsolete.

 

Calculator version dated August 11, 2013.

NOTE: THIS CALCULATOR IS OBSOLETE NOW BECAUSE OF BAR EXAM CHANGES.

PLEASE DON'T RELY ON IT.

Enter LSAT Score
Select your law school's rank:	In the Top 50 In the Top 51-100 In the Top 101-150 Not in the Top 150
Select your approximate class rank:	Top 10% Top 10-20% Top 20-30% Top 30-40% Top 40-50% Bottom 40-50% Bottom 30-40% Bottom 20-30% Bottom 10-20% Bottom 10%
Select the state where you will take the bar:	Alabama Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Maine Maryland Massachusetts Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Predicted bar passage probability:

 

NOTE: This calculator has serious limitations, primarily based on the lack of good, recent data on bar examination candidates. As a result, the underlying data is cobbled together from aggregate data on bar examinations and the most recent individual data available. That individual data, however, dates back to 1994, and did not even include the bar examination state. Accordingly, this calculator should be used for experimental purposes only, and not to plan your life.

It would be very easy to create an accurate calculator if high-quality, recent data were available, and such a calculator could be very useful to law school students and graduates. Unfortunately, state bars and law schools are not very forthcoming with this type of data, making it difficult for students to make good decisions.

I therefore hope that Academic Support professionals at law schools will report to me (by email) how well this calculator corresponds to bar passage statistics within their own schools. If you are a law school administrator, please consider sending me feedback (by email) about how this calculator corresponds with your own bar passage statistics. I will use the information to update the parameters of the calculator and make it more accurate. This will help students who may be at risk of failing the bar to more accurately assess their prospects. If I receive enough feedback, I will be able to calibrate the calculator to provide more accurate predictions.

Comments

[Erin]

Where is Washington??? Do you not care about their bar, are you leaving them out because they 're about to change their archaic exam format, or did they recently secede from the Union and I just missed that bit of news?

[Robert Anderson]

Hi Erin,

Washington is left out for the reason you guessed, that they have changed their bar exam and therefore I have no data for the current exam. I believe they have adopted a 135 passing score (on the MBE scale) so I would guess they'd be similar to Texas (and a large number of other states in difficulty). We won't really know until we get data, because there are many factors besides the passing score that affect exam difficulty.

Best,
RA

[MultiStateScarredExam]

Thank you SO much for making this program. I've been trying to figure out where to try passing and where not to bother. I know this is only provisional, but it confirms most major conclusions from my own (rudimentary) research. The only surprise was S.C. Wow, I wonder what is the point of having a 3-day exam if nearly everyone passes.

[Robert Anderson]

MultiStateScarredExam,

Thanks for the comments! SC is an interesting case because my original model of bar exam difficulty (which indicated a difficult exam) disagreed sharply with the multistate passing score (which indicated an easier exam). I averaged the two approaches in this calculator, so it's possible that SC ended up looking easier in the calculator than it really is. The reason is likely that SC is one of the few states that has a so-called "conjunctive" passing rule (you need to receive a minimum score on individual parts, not a minimum total score). That makes the exam more difficult than the MBE passing score would indicate. When (or if) schools provide me with data to validate the calculator I will be sure to revisit SC with special attention.

Best,
RA

[joe]

I passed sc in 2010 july on first try and ca in 2012 on first try. Ca was exponentially harder than sc a big reason is sc bar tells you what subjects are tested on what day.

[Curious About Statistics]

What is NaN%?

[Robert Anderson]

That's a bug. If you let me know what you put in I will fix it.

[DW]

No Alaska?

[Chetsbabe]

I get NaN% no matter what I put in.

[Robert Anderson]

Chetsbabe, If you give me an example of what you put in that didn't work I will try to fix! It's working for most people though.

[Chetsbabe]

I have tried my real scores, school, etc., as well as various others - including LSAT 155, 165, 170; States Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, New Mexico (I just picked some); schools top 50, 100-150, out of 150; class rank top 10%, 10-20%, 20-30%. All give me the same result NaN%.

[Robert Anderson]

Chetsbabe,

Sorry for the late reply. For some reason the comment went into a spam filter. Could you give me one specific combination of inputs that gave NaN?

Has anyone else been experiencing this?

[Andrew Velonis]

Comedian/Magician Harry Anderson wrote a book called "Bets You Can't Win" in which he wrote: "Suckers want to know what their chances are. Gamblers want to know the odds." A resource that helped me greatly was a book called "Pass This Bar." This was many years ago.

[HopingtoPass]

I'm concerned that my school's curve (grade inflation) is biasing results. How would an excessively favorable curve impact my calculation-should I rank myself as though I did worse than I did in school?

[Amanda]

I have tried putting my information into the calculator multiple times and it does nothing when I click on calculate. No error code, no information, it just sits there.

[Rob Anderson]

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for letting me know. It obviously broke for some reason, but I believe it should be working correctly now.

RA

[Anne]

still doesn't work

[Rob Anderson]

Should be fixed now

[Sean]

Hi:

This calculator no longer works. Is this just me? I'd like to see my results.

[Jen]

Still does not work.

[Rob Anderson]

It should be working now. It periodically breaks for an unknown reason.

[kmac]

This is interesting, but I would take it with a grain of salt. According to this, I only had a 10% chance of passing California, and I passed on the first try with no problem. I was laying out by the pool and shopping the day before the exam, and had about an hour to spare at the end of each session.

[Ohio Law Prof]

Your calculator matches well with our data on our graduates in Ohio, for what it's worth.

[Rob Anderson]

Ohio Law Prof,

Thanks for the feedback! I wish more people would leave that type of feedback as it's valuable for students studying for the bar.

Rob

[Spanish name]

25% to pass
First bar percentage rate 36% - pass
Different jurisdiction with different law system and different language. Pass rate 50%.
Second bar - pass
Your calculator fails.