California Bar Pass Rates by School 2006

I searched this forum but did not find this information, For the benefit of others, here it is grouped by school.

http://www.calbar.ca.gov/calbar/pdfs/admissions/Statistics/JULY2006STATS.pdf

So far as I can tell, this is the latest July pass rate information grouped by schools. (The California Bar is also administered in the Winter, however, those statistics are generally not used for comparison purposes because the majority of First Time takers take the July exam).

Concord, Oak Brook, and Taft had pass rates (First Time) of around a third. However, except for Concord, the number taking the exam was small and therefore the proportion passing is not reliable in a statistical sense.

Statistics for the "Baby Bar" are at http://www.calbar.ca.gov/calbar/pdfs/admissions/FYX/FYX0610-Stats.pdf

 

Bar exam non-passers

While Peoples College of Law in California is not a distance school, some may find this of interest.

The current Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa and Gilbert Cedillo, California State Senator of the 22nd District in Los Angeles, are graduates and the most famous alumni of PCL.

However, Villaraigosa failed the California Bar Exam in each of four attempts, and thus remains unlicensed to practice law. Gilbert Cedillo is not a member of the California State Bar either so it would appear that he too was unable to pass the State Bar Examination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_College_of_Law

 

Using the links in the first post above, we can compare the number of people entering and exiting the "law school pipeline".

The Baby Bar "first time taker" number represents the number of people entering the pipeline.

The General Bar "passing" number (for both first timers and repeaters combined) represents the number of people exiting the pipeline.

Corcord: 263 entered, 15 exited. Implies 94.3 % attrition in the process.
Oak Brook: 39 entered, 4 exited. Implies 89.7 % attrition.
Taft: 38 entered, 1 exited. Implies 97.4 % attrition.

Clearly it is possible to become an attorney through the DL route. But just as clearly, the attrition rate is extremely high.

So distance law schools have not had a major impact in California. For July 2006, a total of 4,616 candidates passed the General Bar exam in California. All distance law schools put together accounted for 27 of these, or about 0.6 % of the total.

 

People's College of Law

I cannot confirm that Cedillo never passed the Bar and my Wikipedia article was edited to reflect this. Unfortunately the Cal State Bar will not release the names of those who failed the Bar, or for those who passed it, how many times it took.

I've filed a California Public Records Act demand for State Senator Cedillo's Bar taking records. I think it's worth knowing that one's legislator couldn't pass the Bar.

 

Why?

There is no requirement that state (or federal) legislators have to be qualified to practice law (and this is probably a good thing). In practice, many legislators are lawyers, of course, but many are not.

Neither my state assemblyman nor my state senator have ever attended law school. If they were to take the Bar Exam, I'm sure that they would score even lower than Cedillo or Villaraigosa. But so what?