July 2017 New York Bar Exam Results: Pass Rate Rises To 86% (+4%); CUNY, Pace, Syracuse Outperform Their Predictors

The July 2017 New York bar passage rates by school are out. Here are the results for first time test takers for the 15 New York ABA-approved law schools, along with each school's U.S. News ranking (New York and overall).

Bar Pass Rank (Rate)	School	US News Rank NY (Overall)
1 (97.9%)	NYU	2 (6)
2 (97.6%)	Columbia	1 (5)
3 (95.7%)	Cornell	3 (13)
4 (93.4%)	Fordham	4 (36)
5 (91.6%)	Syracuse	8 (92)
6 (89.2%)	St. John's	6 (72)
7 (86.8%)	CUNY	14 (127)
86.0%	Statewide Average
8 (85.8%)	Cardozo	5 (65)
9 (78.6%)	Brooklyn	7 (88)
10 (77.5%)	Pace	13 (120)
11 (75.8%)	SUNY-Buffalo	9 (106)
12 (71.3%)	Albany	10 (109)
13 (70.4%)	Hofstra	12 (118)
14 (64.8%)	Touro	15 (Tier 2)
15 (64.7%)	New York Law School	11 (112)

New York Law Journal, Vast Majority of NY Law Schools Improve Bar Exam Passing Rates:

Graduates of 12 of the state’s 15 law schools passed the New York bar exam in July 2017 at higher rates than their classmates did a year earlier.

For the second year in a row, graduates of NYU, Columbia and Cornell performed the best with a 97.9 percent success rate for NYU graduates and the other two schools not far behind. But it was St. John’s University that saw the most dramatic improvement from 76.5 percent in July 2016 to 89.2 percent in July 2017.

It was the second year that New York administered the Uniform Bar Exam. It was one of 27 states to use the test, though a handful of other states have announced that they are switching to the UBE in the next two years. ...

Overall, 86 percent of first-time test takers made the grade, an improvement of 4 percentage points from July 2016. ..

The three law schools in New York that saw declines in the success rates of first-time test takers in July 2017 were Albany, Brooklyn and New York Law School. Albany Law School graduates had a passing rate of 71.3 percent, a decline of 11.4 percentage points from July 2016. At Brooklyn, 78.6 percent of graduates passed compared to 82.7 percent a year earlier and New York Law School saw 64.7 percent pass, a decline of 5.6 percentage points. ...

Syracuse Law School, which came in fifth of the 15 law schools, was proud of its passing rate of 91.6 percent. ...

Dean Simons of St. John’s University sees getting more students to pass the bar as a moral imperative.