After years of advocacy, California finally agreed to permanently lower its passing cut score last year from 1440 to 1390. This new score still made the California bar exam more difficult to pass than most jurisdictions, including legal industry hub New York, but grievance hounds still found a way to complain about the decision.
But this decision made an awkward remainder of applicants who achieved a 1390 or better on the February 2020 exam, but were told that they needed to retake the fall exam anyway.
That didn’t make any sense to anyone who bought the NCBE’s party line that their exam is standardized by psychometricians and a score on one examination is just as good as the score on a later examination. Nor did it jive with past precedent, which offered five years of retroactivity for cut score changes. The state supreme court pretended not to hear these arguments and the state legislature ultimately held hearings, but we can report now that the state will expand its provisional licensing program to include applicants who scored between 1390 and 1439 between July 2015 and February 2020.
It’s been a long time coming, but at least there’s some justice to this. Congrats to everyone who passed the test before for finally getting that recognition.
Earlier: California Supreme Court Refuses To Apply New Cut Score Retroactively
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.