Photo: ExamSoft

It's official: 2019 was a good year to take the bar exam.

The first-time pass rate among graduates from American Bar Association-accredited law schools was nearly 80% in 2019, up from 75% the previous year, according to new ABA data.

That increase is welcome news in the legal academy, which has been plagued with falling or stagnant bar pass rates for the past five years. That gain was not unexpected, however. Upticks in the average score on the Multistate Bar Exam, which is the 200-question multiple-choice portion of the test, for both the February and July administrations gave legal educators hope for a bar exam turnaround. And a number of large jurisdictions posted significant pass rate increases for the July 2019 exam, including Florida, up seven percentage points; New York, up two percentage points; and California, up 10 percentage points.

Harvard Law School posted the highest first-time pass rate in 2019, at nearly 99%. All but six of the school's 561 first-time takers passed. It was followed by Duke Law School with a nearly 98% pass rate, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School at 97%. (The University of Wisconsin Law School and Marquette University Law School appear at the top of the ABA's first-time bar pass rate list, but graduates of those schools do not have to sit for the bar exam in Wisconsin due to the state's unique diploma privilege system.)

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Western Michigan University Cooley Law School posted the lowest first-time pass rate in 2019 outside of Puerto Rico, at 36%. The University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law had the second-lowest pass rate at just below 38%. The third-lowest was the University of San Francisco School of Law, which had a nearly 39% first-time pass rate in 2019.

Bar pass rates are the single best measure of whether law schools are offering a quality legal education that will prepare students for long-term success, according to Barry Currier, the ABA's managing director of accreditation and legal education. Still, he cautioned that high bar pass rates alone aren't enough for a law school to demonstrate that it's meeting the ABA's standards for a rigorous program of legal education. Even so, the figures are useful for prospective law students who will soon be deciding where to enroll.

"The public reports do provide important consumer information for students considering whether and where to attend law school and for others with an interest in legal education," Currier said.

The new ABA data also detail each school's "ultimate bar pass rate," which is the percentage of graduates who passed the bar within two years of leaving campus. In a change adopted last year, the ABA is now giving law schools just two years to ensure at least 75% of graduates pass the exam, instead of the previous five years.

By that measure, six schools had ultimate pass rates of 100% for their 2017 classes—at least when rounding is taken into account. They are: Concordia University School of Law; Yale Law School; the University of Virginia School of Law; the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Duke Law School; and the University of Chicago Law School. (That list also includes the University of Wisconsin, though its graduates don't have to take the bar exam to practice in the state.) Having an ultimate bar pass rate of 100% is somewhat bittersweet for Concordia, which is working frantically to stave off closure after its parent university announced last week that it's shutting down amid financial problems.

According to the new data, nine law schools—not including two in Puerto Rico—failed to meet the new revised standard requiring that 75% of graduates pass the bar within two years. They are: Charleston School of Law; Florida A&M University College of Law; Atlanta's John Marshall Law School; Florida Coastal School of Law; the University of South Dakota School of Law; Western Michigan University Cooley Law School; Mississippi College School of Law; the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law; and Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law.

It's unclear whether the ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has taken any action against those schools. Currier said Tuesday that any such actions would be confidential until the council had reached a decision on the matter.