Peoples College of Law

California Bar Exam Pass Rates for Recent Graduating Classes

Below are the percentages of graduates in the Peoples College of Law (PCL) graduating classes
of 2012 to 2017 who passed the California Bar Exam -- each figure is the percentage of the
graduates of that year who took the exam at least once and passed, including those who passed it
the first time they took it, and those who instead failed, perhaps more than once, but took it again
and passed. These figures should be read in conjunction with this entire memo.

PCL Class of 2017 40% passed

PCL Class of 2016 20% passed

PCL Class of 2015 25% passed

PCL Class of 2014 33 1/3% passed

PCL Class of 2013 25% passed

PCL Class of 2012 33 1/3% passed

(As of this writing, July 28, 2018, the Bar Exams for the Class of 2018 have not yet been graded
by the State Bar, because the exam took place only this past week.)

Every one of our grads since 2012 who has been admitted to the California Bar is employed as a
lawyer representing the under-represented, either as an employee of a law firm, a nonprofit or a
government agency, or as the owner of her or his own private practice. Two grads who passed
the exam have not yet been admitted to the Bar.

The State Bar of California requires unaccredited law schools, such as PCL, to report California
Bar Exam pass rates by calculating them in very specific required ways. One report is in a
required Disclosure Statement. In the statement, for any one administration of the Bar Exam, the
calculation must include the passing or failing not only by people who graduated recently before
the exam, but also by those who graduated many years before the exam. For example, in the
current Disclosure Statement’s report of the results of the February 2016 Bar Exam, to comply
PCL included the result for a member of the 2007 graduating class. As another example, the
current mandatory form for the report under a statute, Busn. and Prof. Code section 6061.7,
requires the schools to report the pass rate for a period some years earlier, 1/1/11 to 12/31/15.
Also, the Bar, in calculating a school’s bar pass rate for purposes of accreditation, counts only
the graduates who took the exam, not those who did not take the exam at all. In other words it
calculates the percentage of exam takers who passed. Our percentages above do the same thing.

Peoples College of Law complies with the State Bar’s requirements, and we believe the Bar has
good faith reasons for them. In addition to them, here we have presented another method of
calculation, one which focuses on recent graduates.

Ira Spiro, Dean, Peoples College of Law