Can I Pass The Bar Exam If I Ran Out Of Time?

Can I Pass The Bar Exam If I Ran Out Of Time?

Each year, many students report running out of time on the bar exam.  If you’re in this group, it’s important to know that you’re not alone.  Even the most well-prepared students can struggle to meet the bar exam’s time limitations.  Students who run out of time on a section (or sections) of the exam naturally ask if they can still pass the bar.  The answer is, of course, yes.  Running out of time is certainly not ideal, but it happens to the best of us.  If you ran out of time on the bar exam, it’s tempting to spend the next month or two anticipating—and preparing for—a failing score.  Before you go down the rabbit hole of unnecessary worry, allow us to offer some perspective.

Can I Pass The Bar Exam If I Ran Out Of Time?

Note: For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume that you’re taking the bar exam in a UBE jurisdiction.  However, many of the principles discussed below apply to the bar exam generally.

First, let’s talk about the MPT. 

The MPT—consisting of two essay-type exercises—is worth 20% of the total bar exam score.  In other words, each of the two exercises is worth 10% of your bar exam score.

In terms of time, you have three hours to complete both exercises.  Generally speaking, most students try to allocate 90 minutes to each exercise.  To take a more drastic example, let’s say that your first exercise took you two hours—30 minutes more than you allotted for.  Even in that scenario, you’d still have an entire hour to at least get something down for the second exercise.  If your work in that hour only earns you 25% of the possible points for the second exercise, you’d lose 7.5% off of your total bar exam score.  That’s not insignificant but in the grand scheme of things, nowhere near fatal.

You can still pass the bar exam if you miss an MPT.

Now, let’s talk about the MEE. 

The MEE—consisting of six essays—is worth 30% of the total bar exam score.  In other words, each of the six essays is worth 5% of your bar exam score.

In terms of time, you have three hours to complete all six essays.  Generally speaking, most students try to allocate 30 minutes to each essay.  Let’s take another drastic example.  Suppose you run six minutes over for each of your first five essays and leave yourself no time to complete the sixth essay.  You’d lose 5% of your total bar exam score.  Again, that’s not insignificant, but overall, it doesn’t drastically affect your chances of passing.

For more information, check out our post containing a detailed discussion of the MEE and time.

Finally, let’s talk about the MBE.

The MBE—consisting of 200 multiple-choice questions (175 of which are scored)—is worth 50% of your total bar exam score.  To break it down even further, the MBE’s morning and afternoon sessions—100 multiple-choice questions apiece—are each worth 25% of your bar exam score.

In terms of time, you have three hours to complete 100 questions in the morning, and three hours to complete 100 questions in the afternoon.  Using yet another drastic example, let’s say that you don’t answer 10 questions in each session.  You’d lose 11.4% of your MBE score, or 5.7% off your total bar exam score.  Once again, not fatal.

For more information, check out our post containing a detailed discussion of the MBE and time.

The Big Picture

If all three of the above scenarios played out on exam day, you’d lose 18.2% off your bar exam score for running out of time.  Now, that’s certainly a substantial percentage, but keep in mind that you need to achieve only a 60% or 65% (with scaled scoring) to pass in most states.  In other words, even if you ran out of time in every section of the exam and missed a not-insignificant number of questions, you still have a strong chance of passing the exam.  Further, if you at least guessed on the multiple-choice questions that you were unable to fully answer, you have a 25% chance of getting those questions correct.

In sum, don’t stress too much if you ran out of time on one or more sections of the bar exam.  As the above examples show, running out of time by no means guarantees a failing score.  At this point, there’s nothing you can do to change what happened on test day, so accept that you gave the exam your best effort and take solace in the fact that many successful exam takers who ran out of time ended up just fine.

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