Maine’s February Bar Results Are Out. OUCH!!!
Posted by Ed Folsom, April 18, 2022.
Maine’s February 2022 Bar Results are out. The pass rate is 40%. In other words, 6 of every 10 takers did not pass. A total of 25 people passed, which means 37 of 62* did not.
February exams tend to have a higher percentage of repeat takers than July exams, and repeat takers fail at a higher rate than first timers, which tends to result in lower overall pass rates for February versus July exams. For instance, 57% of first-time takers passed the February 2022 exam while only 27% of repeat takers passed. But a 40% overall pass rate is pretty bad, any way you slice it.
Since July of 2017, Maine has been a Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) State. It administers exactly the same exam as 32 other states and the District of Columbia. Each jurisdiction that administers the UBE chooses its own “cut” or passing score. Maine used to have one of the highest cut scores in the nation, at 276, but it reduced its cut to 270 after the July 2019 exam. Now, there are 14 UBE jurisdictions with the same or a higher cut score and 19 with a lower cut score than Maine’s.
A major portion of the UBE exam is called the Multi-state Bar Exam (MBE). The MBE is a multiple-choice exam administered even in the states that don’t administer the UBE. The MBE was part of Maine’s exam long before Maine adopted the UBE. On the February 2022 administration of the MBE, the national mean score dropped to match the historic low of 132.6. This portends that bar passage rates for February 2022 bar exams administered in all states are likely to be low.
Why do people who sit for bar exams do so poorly these days?
Maine’s pass rate of 31% on the February 2019 bar exam was the lowest bar passage rate in the nation for that sitting. Take a look at the pass rates for Maine’s exams from February of 2019 through February of 2022 (keeping in mind that Maine reduced its cut score from 276 to 270 after the July 2019 exam):
Feb. 2019: 31%
July 2019: 52%
Feb. 2020: 50%
Sept. 2020 (COVID delay) 86%
Feb. 2021 60%
July 2021 59%
Feb. 2022 40%
That’s pretty ugly. For a glimpse into what the future holds for those who fail the exam, the pass rate for repeat takers in July 2021 was 25%. In February of 2022 it was 27%.
*Or maybe 38 of 63 takers, depending on the rounding used to arrive at 40%.
