The July bar exam results were released this week. According to an article in Wednesday’s New York Law Journal “[t]he six-year slide in bar exam pass rates looks to be at an end”. (Karen Sloan, Bar Pass Rates Are Up. Is the Worst Over?, NYLJ (Oct. 30, 2019).

The increase for students passing the bar in New York rose by two percentage points to a whopping 65%! Is this something we should be celebrating? Why are 35% of our students failing after three years of going through the gauntlet of law school? With the vast amount of reading, writing, class time, law journals, preparing for mock trials or moot court, study groups, internships and externships in law offices and government agencies etc., what are we missing? And after all this, 3Ls have the arduous task of taking specialized bar review courses at great expense and virtually going into hiding from the rest of the world for the two months between graduation and the dreaded exam at the end of July. Something is amiss.