At 84% first-time passage, Creighton Law clears the national average with room to spare, a real signal, worth exactly as much as your understanding of what produced it. Pass rates compress incoming credentials, program rigor, and jurisdiction difficulty into one figure, and this page decompresses it.
MetricFigureContextFirst-time bar passage84%6 pts above the national midpointNational first-time average~75 to 80%Annual benchmarkPrimary jurisdictionNebraskaVerify in the ABA 509
Yes, 84% first-time passage sits clearly above the national average and signals a school whose academic program and incoming class are both doing their jobs. The honest qualifier: state mix matters, so verify the jurisdiction before comparing across schools.
The distance that matters: 6 points above the national midpoint at 84%, margin that survives jurisdiction adjustments in most states.
Bar rates are built, not bestowed, from three materials: who enrolled (medians forecast passage with uncomfortable accuracy), what the program demanded (curves, writing, doctrine), and who remained to be counted (attrition quietly edits the denominator). A school controls each lever differently, which is why the honest comparison is never rate against rate, but rate against inputs, against jurisdiction, against the count of who actually sat.
Withheld Tip: the ABA 509 disclosure is published annually for every accredited school and breaks bar results out by jurisdiction. Pull it, find the state line, and check whether the state you actually intend to practice in appears at all, a New York rate tells a California-bound student almost nothing. Verify the rate for your state, not the school’s headline.
Creighton Law’s bar prep apparatus will resemble the industry standard, commercial course partnerships, a readiness program, advising, and the differences that matter live in the details: what is subsidized, what is required, and when it begins. Make admissions name all three.
One forward-looking note belongs in every bar conversation now: the NextGen bar exam is rolling out across states through 2028, moving the test toward applied skills and integrated tasks. Schools differ in how seriously they are re-tooling for it, make “how is your bar prep changing for NextGen?” a standard admissions question and listen for specifics, not slogans.
The rule: no jurisdiction, no judgment. Until you know which state’s exam a rate describes, the figure cannot be compared, contextualized, or trusted, and any school materials that present it bare are asking you not to check.
About 84% first-time, above the national first-time average of roughly 75 to 80%, a figure that means the most once you know which state’s exam it describes and how that state’s baseline runs. The 509 disclosure carries both.
Because they compress three things into one number: the credentials of admitted students, the rigor of the program, and which state bars graduates sit for. Comparing rates without comparing states and inputs is comparing headlines, not outcomes.
Partly, but it equally reflects who was admitted and who persisted to graduation. Read it alongside the LSAT median and attrition data: when all three are strong, the rate means what it appears to mean.
You are about to spend three years learning to interrogate evidence for a living. Start now, on the school itself: jurisdiction, baseline, trend, denominator. A school that welcomes those questions is telling you something. So is a school that doesn’t.