NCBE Announces National Mean for February 2025 MBE

MADISON, WISCONSIN, March 27, 2025—The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) announced today that the national mean scaled score for the February 2025 Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) was 130.8. The MBE, one of three sections that make up the bar exam in most US jurisdictions, consists of 200 multiple-choice questions answered over six hours. 

In February 2025, both the MBE mean and the number of examinees taking the MBE decreased, as California elected for the first time to administer its own multiple-choice questions in place of the MBE. California is the second-largest jurisdiction in the US by number of bar examinees tested each year, after New York.

The February 2025 MBE mean represents a decrease of approximately one point from the February 2024 national mean of 131.8. However, because of the absence of California examinees from the February 2025 national pool, the most relevant comparison will be to previous years’ performance by examinees in jurisdictions other than California. The mean scaled score for non-California examinees was 131.5 in February 2024 and 130.9 in February 2023.

15,350 examinees took the February 2025 MBE. This represents a decrease of 4,146 examinees compared to the February 2024 administration, when 19,496 examinees took the MBE, 3,948 of them in California. 

“The decrease in this February’s mean represents a change in population and a change in overall performance,” said NCBE Managing Director of Psychometrics Bob Schwartz. “In four of the past five years, the MBE mean for California has been higher than the mean for the combined non-California jurisdictions, so it makes sense that removing California from the national pool might bring the national mean down slightly. It’s important to note, however, that the absence of California from the examinee pool does not affect February’s examinees in jurisdictions that administer the MBE.” The MBE is equated as part of the scoring process to control for any possible differences in exam difficulty or examinee population compared to previous administrations.

The decrease in the national mean can’t be attributed solely to the exclusion of California examinees. According to Schwartz, “Excluding California from the comparison, we saw a decline in performance across all groups of examinees this February; first-time test takers’ performance declined by about a point, while repeaters’ performance was down by about 0.7 points.”[1] Nationally, likely first-time test takers scored an average of 135.1 on the February 2025 MBE, while likely repeat test takers scored an average of 129.0. Although performance was down for all examinees this February, the decrease in the mean for non-California examinees was still driven primarily by repeat test takers, who make up the majority of the February examinee pool. Approximately 71% of February 2025 examinees were likely repeat test takers, and approximately 29% of February 2025 examinees were likely taking the exam for the first time; when California is excluded, these numbers have been stable for three years. 

^{Graph note: The characteristics of the February 2021 examinee population were most likely affected by the small number of examinees who had taken an exam during one of the previous summer’s administrations: only 7,906 examinees took a full MBE in July, September, or October 2020, and approximately 29,000 additional examinees sat for a remotely administered exam using NCBE materials in October 2020. As a result of these differences, any direct comparison of later results with February 2021 results will be of limited value.}

“In general, first-time test takers tend to perform better on the MBE than those who are repeating the exam. Because the majority of February bar examinees are repeat test takers, the February MBE mean, and February pass rates, are lower than those for July examinees,” said Schwartz. (More information is available at Why Are February Bar Exam Pass Rates Lower than July Pass Rates?)

Over the past decade, as a result of widespread adoption of the Uniform Bar Exam, the proportion of repeat test takers who have passed a bar exam has decreased, while the proportion of repeat test takers who have previously failed a bar exam has increased. Repeat test takers who have previously passed a bar exam tend to perform substantially better than those who have previously taken but not passed a bar exam. It is likely that this shift has contributed to a generally downward trend in performance by repeat test takers, as well as an overall decline in the February mean, over the past decade. This year’s decline in first-time examinee scores, on the other hand, is most likely part of a pattern of fluctuating performance by first-time takers over the past several years.

Jurisdictions begin releasing their February 2025 results over the next week; bar examination pass rates as reported by jurisdictions are available on the NCBE website. Many jurisdictions are still in the process of grading the written components of the bar exam; once this process is completed, bar exam scores will be calculated and passing decisions reported by those jurisdictions.

[1] The first-time and repeat MBE-based test taker information calculated by NCBE is an approximation based on the NCBE Number and biographic data, which has not been used consistently in all jurisdictions across time. Prior to 2022, approximately 10% of examinees could not be tracked with certainty by NCBE as either first-time or repeat takers due to a lack of sufficient biographic information.

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About the National Conference of Bar Examiners

The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1931. NCBE promotes fairness, integrity, and best practices in bar admissions for the benefit and protection of the public, in pursuit of its vision of a competent, ethical, and diverse legal profession. Best known for developing bar exam content used by 53 US jurisdictions, NCBE serves admission authorities, courts, the legal education community, and candidates by providing high-quality assessment products, services, and research; character investigations; and informational and educational resources and programs. In 2026, NCBE will launch the next generation of the bar examination, ensuring that the exam continues to test the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for competent entry-level legal practice in a changing profession. For more information, visit the NCBE website at https://www.ncbex.org.

About the Multistate Bar Examination

The Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) is a six-hour, 200-question multiple-choice examination developed by NCBE and administered by user jurisdictions as part of the bar examination, typically given twice each year. The purpose of the MBE is to assess the extent to which an examinee can apply fundamental legal principles and legal reasoning to analyze given fact patterns. The subjects tested on the MBE are Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts. In addition to assessing examinee knowledge and skills, the MBE is used to equate the bar exam. Equating is a statistical procedure used for most large-scale standardized tests to ensure that exam scores retain the same meaning across administrations and over time. More information about the MBE is available on the NCBE website at https://www.ncbex.org/exams/mbe/.

About the Uniform Bar Examination

The UBE is a two-day bar examination composed of the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), two Multistate Performance Test (MPT) tasks, and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). It is uniformly administered, graded, and scored and results in a portable score that can be transferred to other UBE jurisdictions. More information about the UBE is available on the NCBE website at https://www.ncbex.org/exams/ube/. 41 US jurisdictions currently participate in the UBE, and more than 48,000 examinees took the UBE in 2024.