A state bar-commissioned study concludes that California law school students' undergraduate credentials and law school performance accounted for up to 50 percent of the decline in bar exam scores and passing rates between 2013 and 2017.

But much of the slump in pass rates on the July tests during that four-year period cannot be accounted for even after culling data from 11 participating American Bar Association-approved law schools, according to the report, dated Dec. 20 and conducted by Research Solutions Group.

The 113-page report is unlikely to offer much guidance for law school deans, bar officials, students and lawmakers seeking answers for the decade-long decline in California bar exam pass rates, which plummeted to 40.7 percent—a 67-year low—for the July 2018 sitting.

The bar has also released a breakdown of pass rates by schools for the July exam. All 25 of the Duke University Law School graduates who took the exam for the first time passed, setting the highest rate for any school with more than 10 test-takers. Ivy Leaguers from Yale (93 percent), Harvard (89 percent) and Columbia (88 percent) law schools also did well.

Other notable school results: Forty-nine of the 60 first-time test takers from Georgetown University Law Center (82 percent) passed. Fourteen of 22 first-time takers from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (64 percent) passed, and nearly all of the University of Virginia School of Law's first-time test takers passed: 20 of 24 students (83 percent).

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Read the full California bar statistics report here:

Success rates for California-based ABA-accredited schools were more unsettling. Ninety-one percent of Stanford University Law School students passed the exam, making it the only school in the state to surpass the 90 percent pass rate. Eighty-six percent of University of California, Berkeley law students passed, as did 83 percent from University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

Other law schools saw their success rates for first-time exam-takers drop to unusually low levels—69 percent at the University of California, Irvine and 75 percent at the University of California, Davis. Five schools saw a majority of their alumni fail the test.

Given the timing of the release of both reports and the holiday weekend, attempts to reach several law school deans for comment were not successful.

The Research Solutions Group report found that students' final law school grade-point averages had the strongest predictive relationship to their success on the bar exam, followed by their first-year law school GPAs, their Law School Admission Test scores and their undergraduate GPA. Mean LSAT scores of students taking the bar exam edged down from 159.4 in 2013 to 157.1 in 2017.

The report also noted that percentage of women and ethnic minorities taking the bar exam increased by six percentage points each during that four-year period. The average age of test-takers also rose from 28.9 in 2013 to 2017.

Older students logged slightly lower scores on the written portion of the exam, reducing their chances of passing by a small amount, the report found. The increased number of women taking the test had no correlation to success rates and “this study reconfirmed that racial/ethnic minorities with equivalent credentials to whites will tend to earn the same scores on the [bar exam] and have the same probability of passing,” the report concluded.

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