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Pepperdine Law Students Excel on California Bar Exam 

July California Bar Exam Results

The official results for the July 2006 California Bar Exam have been released, and Pepperdine University School of Law has had another strong showing. Of the twenty ABA-approved California schools, Pepperdine holds the fifth highest overall passage rate among first-time takers. 

These results follow on the heels of Pepperdine achieving the highest passage rate on the February 2006 bar exam.

For the July exam, the overall passage rate for all takers was 51.3 percent and 67.4 percent for first-time takers. Among the ABA-accredited schools in California, 73.7 percent of first-time takers passed.

At Pepperdine, 83.84 percent passed the July exam, behind only Stanford (89.24), UCLA (86.45), USC (85.86), and UC Berkeley (85.07). Of the remaining fifteen schools, only UC Hastings (83.70) was above 80, with Santa Clara (78.81), San Diego (78.39), UC Davis (76.36), and Loyola LA (75.14) rounding out the top ten.

On a national perspective, Pepperdine outperformed numerous out-of-state ABA-accredited law schools on the California bar exam (each of whom had at least twenty first-time takers), such as Yale University (76), University of Michigan (82), Northwestern University (68), Georgetown University (77), and Boston University (73), among others.

On the February 2006 administration of the California bar exam, 85.71 percent of Pepperdine first-time takers passed, surpassing all other California schools. UC Berkeley (81.82) and Stanford (78.57) also finished in the top three of this administration, which has fewer takers than the July exam.

Pepperdine's Associate Dean for Student Life, Jim Gash, praises the students for attaining these strong scores. "We are gratified with our bar passage rate this year and extremely proud of our students who worked so hard for the success they earned," he says. "We have set a goal of finishing as one of the top five California schools each year. We met this goal this year and are optimistic that the current group of third-year students can achieve the same results, if not better."

At a December ceremony in which graduates who passed the bar exam were sworn into state and federal courts, Dean Ken Starr addressed the students. "You should be so proud of what you have accomplished individually. . . We are so very proud of you."

Statistics Courtesy of the State Bar of California: http://www.calbar.ca.gov