American Bar Association: First-Time Bar Pass Rate for Black Candidates in 2022 Was Below 58%
“We know that education was significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and that the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities”
New data from the American Bar Association shows a large disparity in pass rates among minorities. This is not a new trend but the current numbers are worse than the previous year.
From the ABA Journal:
First-time bar pass rate for Black candidates below 58%, ABA data shows
According to information released Tuesday by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Black candidates continue to have the lowest first-time test-taker pass rate, which was 57% in 2022, compared with 61% in 2021.
Out of 33,721 first-time bar examinees in 2022, 2,510 candidates were Black, according to ABA data, which parses out pass rates by race, ethnicity and gender.
Among other first-time test-takers:
• The pass rate for Native Americans was 60% out of 183 candidates.
• The pass rate for Hawaiians was 69% out of 45 candidates.
• The pass rate for Hispanics was 69% out of 4,201 candidates.
• The pass rate for people who were two or more races was 74% out of 1,186 candidates.
• The pass rate for Asians was 75% out of 2,199 candidates.
• The pass rate for whites was 83% out of 21,553 candidates.
Also, section data shows the 2022 first-time pass rate was 77% for women and 80% for men. For people with another gender identity, the first-time pass rate was 79%; and for those who did not disclose their gender, the pass rate was 63%.
Additionally, the data examined two-year bar-passage rates. Based on 2021 graduates, those pass rates were:
• 51% for Hawaiian candidates.
• 72% for Black candidates.
• 79% for Native American candidates.
• 81% for Hispanic candidates.
• 85% for candidates who were two or more races.
• 86% for Asian candidates.
• 90% for white candidates.
This is obviously going to be used as a justification to to modify bar exams because of racial disparities.
From Reuters:
Racial disparities in bar exam scores worsened in 2022
The gaps in bar pass rates between white and minority law graduates widened in 2022 for the second straight year, according to new data from the American Bar Association.
The first-time pass rate for white test takers last year was 83%, while 57% of Black examinees passed on their first attempt — a difference of 26 percentage points — the ABA said Tuesday. In 2021, that gap was 24 percentage points…
Bar exam critics have long pointed to racial gaps in results as evidence that the attorney licensing exam is biased against minority test takers—a charge the national conference has consistently refuted.
A national conference spokesperson called the differing pass rates “troubling” on Wednesday, while noting that those disparities are not new and are the result of many factors.
“We know that education was significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and that the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities, often exacerbating existing disparities,” said national conference spokesperson Valerie Hickman.
Perhaps what we really need are more strong law professors.
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Comments
Rather than an issue with the exams, I suspect an issue with admissions. How many of those candidate would have gotten into Law School if they had ben Asian?
Less qualified person allowed admission.
Less qualified person graded “differently.”
Less qualified person graduated.
Less qualified person does not pass the Bar.
Imagine the embarrassment and the self doubt.
A person has been in school for 7/8 years and the people that were paid to prepare them,
failed.
How do you show up at family functions?
Imagine applying for work.
Allowing people to be admitted where their chances of success are diminished is just cruel.
A lack of attorneys is not a problem in society. It’s a blessing. My theory is a society collapses when inundated with too many legal professionals.
You misspelled ideologues masquerading as legal professionals that believe their feels should be able to change the law.
Justice is supposed to be blind.. cough cough cough… Maybe the ABA should do that too.. just stop keeping stats. I know.. magical thinking.
Shouldn’t I be allowed to “IDENTIFY” as a lawyer and be admitted to the Bar?
Bar / Locker room, what’s the difference?
Well, there you have it! Get rid of the Bar Exam! Problem fixed! Any objections?
Agreed!!
I don’t quite understand what’s going on with Bar pass rates But for background, people should understand, the exam is not that difficult. That may not have been the case years ago but all I can say is presently it’s rather a joke. I suspect the best and the brightest, regardless of race, are not trying to become licensed attorneys..
It helps to have a good memory. That’s about it. As you say, not that difficult. It’s a waste to require people to have a JD degree.
“We know that education was significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and that the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities.”
Why is the author blaming the pandemic? Education is not a priority for some “marginalized” communities regardless of situations.
“Marginalized” is a facile word, depending on the bias of the author.
Yeah, the priorities matter, and the most important priorities are those of the parents.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/14/parenting-nine-year-old-high-school-graduate-david-balogun.html
“shows a large disparity in pass rates among minorities”
Shhh, ya not supposa say anything negative about any Democrat protected class.
I’ll caveat this with, “I’m not a lawyer.”
There is no national bar exam, but rather each state does their own. Looking at a national average of 50 states each with vastly different pass rates and demographics in each state paints an impressionistic picture at best.
California has the toughest bar exam for all historically. I’ll assume that Hispanics are also a greater share of test takers in California than the nation at large. Which would pull down the national average.
I do not know if Calf has the hardest exam.
However, it allows graduates of CA law schools that are not accredited by ABA to take the exam.,
Sorry, there is the Uniform Bar Examination has been adopted by most of the U.S. states as the exam to give potential lawyers. So there is in a sense a “national bar exam”.
Of course, states like California just have to be different and haven’t adopted the UBE. But there you go.
https://www.ncbex.org/exams/ube/Don’t they test for knowledge of unusual state laws and court processes?
Interesting observation Herm.
I am dually licensed as an engineer and as a surveyor. In both license exams, there are national components for fundamentals and professional testing (NCEES), and then a state by state exam for the rules & regs particular to that state. Reciprocity is typically granted upon passng the state exam, once a license has been granted in the first state of practice.
Could it be that the obsession with DIE policies and affirmative action have propped up undeserving candidates based on racial criteria regardless of academic achievement which consequentially dragged down the average scores because you gave under-qualified people a pathway to a legal career?
… nah, the COVID virus is just racist
Perhaps there is simpler reason; too many people being allowed to graduate law school and those on the lower end academically are not as competitive. It all begins with admissions and academic mismatch. Higher end institutions seeking diversity suck up the more qualified applicants leaving lowered tiered institutions with far less qualified applicants. That trickles down all the way to unaccredited law schools. Bottom line IMO is too many people who want to become attorneys but lack the academic ability pushing the average down.
The Dumb-o-crats’ corrosive racial obsessions are becoming exceedingly tiresome. An attorney’s skin pigmentation and ethnicity are totally irrelevant traits in assessing his/her professional competence and worth.
Isn’t it constitutionally correct to assert that the bar exams are all racist because of the disparate impact of the exam?
So what they’re saying is that black people can’t study as hard as any other race and that’s because of racism or some sorry virus of unknown origin.
Woke white Leftists are the worst kind of racist.
“Woke white Leftists are the worst kind of racist.”
On the other hand, strong black conservatives are woke white leftists worst nightmare.
Indeed. I’ve been called everything under the sun because I’m a black conservative by the supposed enlightened woke white Leftist.
““We know…the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities, often exacerbating existing disparities,” said national conference spokesperson Valerie Hickman.
“We know.” Yes, of course. End of discussion. No questions. No proof.
I guess enforcing the capitalization of “Black” along with ditching Aunt Jemima wasn’t the cure-all they were hoping for. Oh well, More money, more “programs” and more black families in bourgeois home settings on TV commercials should do the trick.
My anecdotal experience is that very good students were not impacted very much while poor students were impacted quite a bit. I can’t say anything about racial differences because most of my students at this school are white. There is a noticeable difference between students pre- and post- the ridiculous and unnecessary school shutdown.
Your students are white. Your comments are irrelevant.
Of course. How could I have forgotten?
Sadly, the joke contains more truth that I would like.
I refer you to Charles Murray’s book, “The Bell Curve” who researched and wrote about the difference in mental capability between the white race and the black race. He did it as a liberal to offer some educational help because the typical approach was not working for them. Liberals were outraged at his findings and called him, wait for it, a racist! What he found was that using a bell curve, blacks were one standard deviation below whites in intelligence. That means that they need a different type of education process and by not listening to him, the results are the same in every category of education. They come in last in every mental test that is given but most of the results are hidden or never talked about as if they didn’t exist. As a society, we owe it to the black race to help them without any embarrassment, to find a way to help them get educated properly.
all classes to be given in English and Ebonics?
I wouldn’t cite that book, if I were you. That book came out when it was in great vogue to try to find deep meaning in experimental noise. They fail to take into account the fundamentals of statistics, and argue a result that is 180 degrees off the data.
Intelligence tests were originally designed to test schools, not children, They contain an inherent assumption about what the children have been taught. The margin of error on intelligence tests is quite broad, + or – 20 points. If two tests are within the margin of error, they are THE SAME.
The authors found a 15 point difference. Notice that 15 points is less than the margin of error, which is 20 points. That means the scores are THE SAME.
It does not matter if the difference is between two individuals, or two populations. It doesn’t matter how many tests were run. If the difference between the two is less than the margin of error, the scores are THE SAME.
They are CONSISTENTLY different over many repetitions of such tests, and CONSISTENTLY in the same direction. That dog don’t hunt.
True, though the deviation among members of the same group is far larger than between groups. There are differences between groups but group identity doesn’t translate into accurate predictions of how an individual will perform. Each person deserves to be weighed and measured as an individual, judged on their own merits and competence.
When it comes to height between sexes, there is a larger intra-group difference than the difference between the two curves.
We can still reasonably say boys are taller than girls. Because they generally are.
Dathurtz,
Sure we can but a prudent person doesn’t speak in absolutes b/c their case can be upended by one counter example. Use of the qualifier ‘in general’ helps keep everyone focused on the practical arguments v veering off into a discussion of exceptions.
Maybe I am misremembering something. If the standard deviation is 15 on a normal.distribution centered on 100, with at least 100 data points, then shouldn’t the 90% confidence interval be significantly less than the standard deviation?
You may be right but empirical evidence says you are wrong. Every school, job entry, military, and political office shows that you are wrong. If the tests they used to come up with the book were so useless, how did they come up with the truth? How does one justify robbing a 7/11 with $40 in the till? How does one justify beating a McDonald’s worker because they didn’t get enough ketchup? How do you reconcile gangs of blacks beating homeless people? How do you reconcile the brutality towards women by black men? Who are the looters in a national crisis? What group makes up over 50% of violent crime but is only 12% of the population? What group consistently rates at the bottom of every school classroom? What group consistently gets thrown out of cities because of their Spring break violence and lewd behavior? What group consistently resists arrest by policemen provoking brutal responses? I wish that your take was the right one but real life tells us that you are wrong.
“Intelligence tests were originally designed to test schools, not children, ”
Valerie. Stop right there. Wrong. Read about the development of IQ tests. Also, learn about the difference between the standard error and the standard deviation. Learn about the difference between achievement and intelligence tests.
“shows a large disparity in pass rates among minorities”
Some have what it takes to be lawyers. Others for being doctors or chemists. Others have what it takes to kick, throw, or bounce balls or chant vulgar poetry to drum machine tracks.
I’ll believe the Regressives genuinely think poor Black performance in school and on standard tests is the result of discrimination when they agitate for the NBA to have percentages of white and Asian players proportionate to their share of the population.
And for equal numbers of men and women in prisons – if they can still tell the difference between a man and a woman.
As a psychometrician for over 40 years, I can tell you that any high-stakes, broadly administered test will show differential performance among reporting groups, usually in a predictable manner, going back to the WWI Army Alpha. Test development organizations spend fortunes trying to eliminate “bias,” usually in subjective ways by having supposed experts review individual questions (items) for potential problems. Technically this is a fairness rather than a bias review as bias is a statistical phenomenon. Unfortunately, much energy is expended on the political correctness aspect rather than what may be the somewhat painful truths (see above reference to The Bell Curve). One of the items showing the greatest disparate impacts I ever saw was, “Round 4.76 to the nearest whole number.”
“Bar exam critics have long pointed to racial gaps in results as evidence that the attorney licensing exam is biased against minority test takers”
LOL.
How can they even begin to give any details on that? Is it that the concept of a judicial system is biased – because that is essentially what they are saying.
Also, what’s up with the Hawaiians? 69% first-time pass rate but dropping to 51% for second year? It seems like you can throw a Hawaiian out if he doesn’t pass the first year. Maybe the Kennedys are really Hawaiian?
Mazie Hirono seems to be getting dumber each year too
That’s two different groups of students – 2022 graduates for the 1 year rate and 2021 for the two year rate – and a sample size so small that random variation is the biggest factor in the scores.
is the 58% before or after the “curve?”
A disinterested observer might wonder if white men, as a group, are innately much smarter than other groups.
The first issue in discussing that question is defining what “smart” is. IQ tests measure a hard to define variable called “g,” which can have many components such as different types of reasoning, financial success, social skills, etc. and is thought by many to be inheritable. Trying to define it, measure it, and improve it for those who show deficiencies is a dangerous pursuit–see the personal destruction of Herrnstein and Murray after publishing The Bell Curve.
It is easy to measure and well established. The sole issue is cowardice. The posters on this site will continue to lose out to leftists until they have the guts to face this. If you cede this ground, the wokesters will win every single argument by employing valid, yet unsound logic. The wokesters know they are lying. You don’t know that you are lying to yourself.
Um, maybe study harder.
This info may be correct, but I would strongly caution against taking the ABA’s word on ANY matter involving race. The ABA is to legal commentary what CNN is to journalism.
This is the result of the corrosive and corrupt practice of Affirmative Action. Blacks, at every education level, are given points. The ultimate result is that Blacks get by with poor skills. And when they finally have to complete, the learn the hard way they weren’t as good as they thought they were.
We have the same problem in Public Accounting. Blacks are constantly given points and the easy road. Then comes the CPA exam and they don’t get Affirmative Action Points and, unsurprisingly, they don’t very well.
Not that anyone does really well. The average pass rate per part is 50% because they design the test to be as hard as possible.
I’d be interested to find out how the various groups stacked up in the “heckling guest speakers” portion of the exam.
Why exactly do we care how ethnic groups do on the bar exam?
The black community isn’t failing these exams individuals who happen to be black are.
The minority of one is such an important concept.
No amount of “affirmative action” cam compensate for low IQ.
This isn’t due to a failure on the part of educators.
Administors aren’t doing these students any favors by admitting them to programs based on their race when they don’t have the intelligence to succeed.
This is besudes the fact that they are actively discriminating against better applicants to make room for these “diversity” students.
Each year, tens of thousands of students who could succeed are being denied the opportunity to pursue their chosen career because they were born with the ‘wrong’ color skin.
The education system did fail them it is why they use affirmative action. An affirmative action admission is the definition of a failure in the education system.
“• The pass rate for Asians was 75% out of 2,199 candidates.
• The pass rate for whites was 83% out of 21,553 candidates.”
Wow. How did that happen?
In my state, white people who are “not economically deprived” consistently outperform asian’s who are not economically deprived on English and history standardized tests. Barely. It flips for the math and science tests.
“We know that education was significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and that the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities”
And what data supports that statement? I’m so tired of the claims of victimization.