|

A wealth of bar passage data recently released by the American Bar Association provides the most comprehensive picture yet of which law schools' graduates are acing the test, and which are struggling.

The ABA this year overhauled the timing and format of how it reports schools' bar pass rates in a bid to get that information out to the public faster, and to make it easier to compare data across schools.

We're taking a deeper dive into the numbers this week. Today, we're looking at what's dubbed the “ultimate bar pass rate.” For the first time, the ABA has released the information, which is the percentage of a school's graduates who passed the bar within two years of graduation. Unlike first-time bar pass rate, the ultimate pass rate captures graduates who may have failed the exam on their initial attempt, but passed on their second or third tries. Nationwide, nearly 88 percent of 2015 grads passed the exam within two years. Baylor University School of Law posted the highest ultimate bar pass rate—all 109 of its bar takers passed in that time period. The University of Detroit Mercy School of Law had the lowest ultimate bar pass rate in 2015, at just under 57 percent. The chart below shows where each law school landed.

But not every law graduate takes the bar. The chart also shows which schools had the highest percentage of graduates who didn't take the exam within two years. One-third of 2015 graduates from Southern University Law Center didn't take the bar—the most of any school, according to the ABA data.

Finally, we break down which law schools seem to have a hard time figuring out how their graduates fared on the all-important licensing exam. We've listed the schools according to the percentage of their 2015 class for which they reported no bar pass information to the ABA. Detroit Mercy is tops in this category, with data missing for 24 percent of that class.

Check out our other stories and charts based on the ABA's recent release of bar pass data. In our first report, we looked at the first-time bar pass rates of each law school in 2017, and how they performed in comparison to state averages. Next we focused on the the first-time bar pass rates of individual jurisdictions, which vary widely. Finally, we're examining how each law school's 2015 graduates fared on the bar exam over a two-year period, as well as which school's graduates sit out the test.

Explore the charts below to see how your school fared.