What Exactly Is A Passing MBE Score?

What Exactly Is A Passing MBE Score?

The Multistate Bar Exam, or MBE, is made up of 200 multiple-choice questions.  Exam takers have three hours to complete the first 100 questions in the morning session, and three hours to complete the second 100 questions in the afternoon session.  Generally speaking, the MBE is worth 50% of your total bar exam score. When beginning their bar prep, many students are eager to know what a passing MBE score.  This curiosity is understandable—when you know what the passing score is, you can assess and adjust your studying based on your performance on practice questions and practice exams.

In this post, we’ll explain how to determine—within a reasonable degree of certainty—what a passing score is on the MBE.

What Exactly Is A Passing MBE Score?

First, it’s important to understand that most jurisdictions do not have a technical “passing” score for the MBE. 

Rather, most jurisdictions simply have a passing score for the entire bar exam.  For example, in New York (a Uniform Bar Exam jurisdiction), a passing bar exam score is 266 out of 400.  While it may be helpful to consider a 133 (266 divided in half) as the “passing” MBE score in New York, this is not a technical requirement.  In other words, you could score a 130 on the MBE and still pass the exam if your MEE and MPT scores made up the remaining 136 points.

With that said, there are a few jurisdictions with a minimum MBE score.  For example, Kentucky requires a minimum MBE score of 132 and South Dakota requires a minimum MBE score of 135.  You should check with your specific jurisdiction to determine if you are required to score a minimum amount of points on the MBE.

For convenience, we’ve created a list of passing MBE scores for each jurisdiction.

Second, it’s important to understand the difference between a “raw” MBE score and a “scaled” MBE score. 

Keep in mind that only 175 of the 200 questions in the MBE are actually scored.  A “raw” MBE score is essentially based on the number of scored questions that you answer correctly out of the total number of scored questions.

Your raw MBE score is NOT what is used to determine if you pass the MBE.  Rather, the score that matters for the purposes of passing is your “scaled” MBE score.  A scaled MBE score is based on your raw score plus an additional 10-15 points (roughly speaking).  The National Conference of Bar Examiners, or NCBE, basically converts your raw score into a scaled score by adding points to your raw score using a “statistical process” that accounts for “differences in difficulty” when comparing a current exam to past exams.

For example, if you plan to take the New York bar exam and your goal is to achieve a scaled score of 133 on the MBE, you may only need to achieve a raw score of around 114.  Put simply, you may only need to answer around 114 scored questions correctly out of 175 scored questions.  In percentage terms, this translates to approximately 65% correct.

You may be wondering how to convert a raw score to a scaled score. 

In order to help answer this question, we’ve analyzed past exam administrations and created a conversion table that provides approximate conversions between raw scores and scaled scores. This table is not a guarantee, but it offers a fairly accurate estimate of the proper conversions.

Using the conversion table accessible in the above link, let’s take New York as an example again.  If your goal is to score a 133 on the MBE, then that is the scaled score that you want to achieve.  Once you find this score in the scaled score column of the table, find the corresponding raw score.  According to the table, if you want to achieve a scaled score of 131 to 135 on the MBE, then you need to achieve a raw score of 111 to 118.

Now, if you decide that a scaled score in the 131 to 135 range is cutting things too close, you can always aim for a higher scaled score.  Suppose, for example, that you decide to aim for a scaled score of 136 to 140.  According to the table, you would then need to achieve a raw score of 118 to 123.

The big picture

 All of these numbers can seem a bit overwhelming, so let’s review the basics.  A jurisdiction’s passing MBE score is a scaled MBE score.  Once you know what scaled score you need to pass, use the conversion table to find a rough estimate of what raw score you need to obtain.  Divide this raw score by 175. This will provide you with the percentage of questions you need to answer correctly to meet your MBE goal.  We can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that if you are shooting for a scaled score of 133 on the MBE, you should aim to answer 63% to 66% of the scored questions correctly in order to be in the “safe” zone.

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