How Many Right MBE Answers Do I Need to Pass the California Bar?

How Many Right MBE Answers Do I Need to Pass the California Bar?

In California, you’ll take the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) on day two of your test administration. You’ll have six hours to answer 200 multiple-choice questions that test your legal knowledge. If you’re wondering how many of those 200 questions you’ll need to answer correctly to pass the California Bar Exam, you’ve come to the right place! We’ll explain how to think about scoring below.

How Many Right MBE Answers Do I Need to Pass the California Bar?

Calculating Your Raw Score

Although the MBE consists of 200 questions, only 175 of those questions are scored. The other 25 questions are test questions that the test makers are evaluating for future exams — but there’s no way to tell them apart, so you’ll need to take each question seriously! Of the scored questions, each is worth 1 point. So how many do you need to get right to pass the California Bar? It depends on how California converts your raw score to your scale score.

Check out this post and chart on the MBE raw score conversions.

Converting to Your Scaled Score

The National Conference of Bar Examiners scores the MBE, and then converts your raw score into a scaled score using a secret formula. Then, California converts this score onto a 2000 point scale. According to the California State Bar, this transformation is designed to account for possible differences in question difficulty.

Determining Your Target Score

While the different scoring conversions may lead to more fair score comparisons, it makes it nearly impossible to determine the exact number of questions you need to answer correctly to pass the MBE section of the California Bar Exam. The current MBE passing score in California is 1390. Based on previous scoring tables, you will need between 126 and 135 correct answers to get a 1390 on the MBE section.

However, there’s another important aspect to keep in mind: your MBE score and your written score are averaged together to get your final score. If your score on the written section of the test is higher, then you’ll need fewer correct answers on the MBE to pass — and vice versa! To be on the safe side, keep working on both the MBE and written sections until you can regularly hit your target score. Be sure to check out our free California Bar Exam Essay Guide and our free MBE Guide to make sure you’re staying on track!

Don’t forget to check out our MBE Question Bank with over 1,700 questions to practice with. This includes questions that you can tailor based on subject and answer explanations for every answer choice so you can better understand exactly why an answer choice is correct or incorrect.

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