The Law Schools Dominating The Bar Exam — Who’s Leading The Pack? (2024)
Which law schools outperformed the rest of the competition when it came to passing the bar exam? The post The Law Schools Dominating The Bar Exam — Who’s Leading The Pack? (2024) appeared first on Above the Law.
The 2024 administration of the bar exam may be in the rearview mirror, but now we’ve got some interesting data on which law schools came out on top when it came to their graduates’ pass rates.
As noted by Reuters, the American Bar Association recently released information concerning bar exam outcomes for the nearly 200 law schools it accredits. The pass rate for first-time test takers inched up to about 83% in 2024, an increase over 2023’s 79% first-time pass rate. This is the highest first-time pass rate since 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc upon test takers nationwide. But which law schools truly did the best on the bar exam? Here are some additional details:
The eight schools with the highest 2024 first-time pass rates are all in the so-called T-14 — the 14 highest ranked schools according to U.S. News & World Report. But three Texas law schools outside the T-14 landed among the 15 schools with the highest 2024 pass rates.
According to Reuters, these are the 15 law schools that were a cut above the rest when it came to their 2024 first-time bar exam pass rates:
- Harvard: 97.86%
- Duke: 97.48%
- Chicago: 97.42%
- NYU: 96.72%
- Penn: 96.70%
- Stanford: 96.50%
- Yale: 96.50%
- Cornell: 96.41%
- Texas A&M: 95.98%
- Columbia: 95.85%
- Texas: 95.62%
- Michigan: 95.57%
- Belmont: 95.00%
- UVA: 94.98%
- Baylor: 94.92%
For reference, the T14 law schools that didn’t make the list here are UCLA (94.23%), Georgetown (92.95%), Northwestern (91.80%), and UC Berkeley (91.16%).
Congratulations to all of the law schools that made the list!
These US law schools crushed the bar exam in 2024 [Reuters]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
The post The Law Schools Dominating The Bar Exam — Who’s Leading The Pack? (2024) appeared first on Above the Law.
