When will the October 2020 New York Bar Exam Results be Released?

The October 2020 New York Bar Exam results should be released around the last week of November or first week of December. But as many know, this year is special!

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Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy. This could be our motive for the year 2020 and this is surely what the 5,165 people who took the New York’s Bar exam have in mind right now.

This year has not been easy. After being postponed, then cancelled, then moved online, the Bar Exam has been an emotional roller coaster this year. In fact, a survey of those who took New York’s first-ever online bar exam suggests that 41% of the candidates had a bad experience.

When the Will October 2020 New York Bar Exam Results be Released?

We can usually give a time window for the Bar exam results. The New York State Board of Law Examiners seems to like releasing results on Tuesday through Friday most of the time (when releasing July results, they seem to like Wednesdays and Fridays, and when releasing February results, they seem to like Tuesday and Thursday). Like many state boards, they tend to avoid releasing results on Mondays.

However, there is no telling what will happen this fall, as the exam is not traditionally administered at this time. JD Advising believes that the board will soon release the pass list to give those who fail ample time to study for the February 2021 bar exam.

COVID-19 has made things unclear. Why?

(1) First, because the October session had significantly less takers.

(2) Second, because the exam took place much later and probably will not follow the standard timeline.

(3) Finally, it is unclear if the Board will change their grading process due to the pandemic; they might want to use a different grading curve for example.

What are the States doing?

You can track the Bar Exam Results by Jurisdiction. A few states have already released the Bar Exam results. This is the case for Florida:

The Court approved 1,487 candidates for admission to The Florida Bar on November 20, 2020, and Chief Justice Charles T. Canady has announced that they may be sworn in as members of The Florida Bar. A formal induction ceremony to swear in the new attorneys will be via Zoom on December 9, 2020.

This is a 47.4 percent passage rate. But 47 percent passed the July 2019 administration, so this is pretty much par for the course. The first-time pass rate was 71.7 percent. By comparison, the first-time passage for July 2019 was 73.9 percent.

On a different note, Kentucky also released their bar exam results, but they encountered a scoring error, resulting in 15 aspiring Kentucky lawyers finding out just days later that they’d actually failed.