For the first time in six years, a majority of people who took the most recent California bar exam passed.

The pass rate on California's July 2019 bar exam climbed to 50.1%, rebounding from a historic low of 40.7% last year, according to figures released by the state bar late Friday.

Though still low in comparison to the success rate in other states, California's passing rate marked the best showing on a July exam since July 2013. Alumni of American Bar Association-approved schools located outside California posted the best pass rate, 73%. Seventy-one percent of applicants from ABA-approved schools in California passed.

The 3,886 applicants who passed the July 2019 exam will be eligible to take the attorney's oath after completing all administrative admission requirements.

Beyond the improved passing score, the July 2019 exam will long be remembered for what happened in the days leading up to the two-day test. On July 27, three days before the exam's start, bar officials were notified that the agency had inadvertently provided the test's essay topics to 16 law school deans. Although there was no evidence the topics were shared with students, bar leaders decided to disclose the subjects to all 9,000 registered test-takers.

A report commissioned by the California Supreme Court and released publicly this week blamed the improper disclosure on human error.

Bar leaders said Friday they retained two testing consultants to review the essay topics' early release, and both concluded that the release had no significant impact on the results.

"The State Bar did not take lightly the decision to release the essay and performance test topics to all test takers, and thus we are relieved by the findings of the psychometricians that statistical analysis demonstrated that the integrity of the examination was not impacted, that performance was as predicted based on historical data, and the passing rate was not affected," Alan Steinbrecher, chairman of the state bar's board of trustees, said in a statement.

The results mirror higher pass rates already reported by other states for the July 2019 exam. Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia all saw passing rates climb year-over-year from July 2018. New York saw its pass rate climb two percentage points, to 65%.

Florida reported one of the largest jumps besides California's, moving from a pass rate of 67% in 2018 to 74% this July. Similarly, New Jersey saw its pass rate rise seven percentage points to 66%. North Dakota notched the largest increase, 10 percentage points better.

The National Conference of Bar Examiners predicted higher pass rates in early September, when it reported that the national average score on the Multistate Bar Exam, the daylong, multiple-choice portion of the exam administered by almost every state, had increased 1.6 points from the previous year, which represented a 34-year low.

The names of those who passed California's bar exam will be published on the bar's website at 6 a.m. Sunday.

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