79% first-time passage puts Temple Beasley Law squarely at the national average. Read that as a baseline, not a verdict: average rates at hard-bar states and easy-bar states mean very different things, and the ABA’s own disclosures let you tell which story this is.
MetricFigureContextFirst-time bar passage79%The headline under reviewNational first-time average~75 to 80%Annual benchmarkPrimary jurisdictionPennsylvaniaState of recordU.S. News rank#55Peer-tier context
It is solidly average, 79% sits inside the national 75 to 80% band. At this range, the state being measured and the credentials of the entering class explain most of the picture, which is why the 509 breakdown matters more than the headline.
For calibration: 79% is 2 points above the national midpoint, a gap small enough that state difficulty alone could account for it.
Decompose the number and it stops being mysterious. Inputs: the credentials of admitted students, which track bar results closely. Program: how hard the school works its middle of the class, rigor and writing predict passage better than prestige. Denominator: attrition decides who even sits for the exam, so two schools with identical teaching can post different rates by graduating different fractions of their entrants. The 509 disclosure exposes each piece.
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.
Like most ABA-accredited schools, Temple Beasley Law supports bar preparation through commercial-course partnerships, readiness programming, and faculty advising, ask admissions for specifics rather than assuming the label covers the substance.
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.
Roughly 79% on the first attempt, in line with the national 75 to 80% average. Treat the figure as jurisdiction-specific until the 509 says otherwise, and read it across years, not in isolation.
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.
It means inputs, instruction, and attrition jointly produced a number. Untangle them, median in, dismissal rate, jurisdiction, before crediting the classroom. When all three check out, so does the rate.
The bar exam is the final feedback loop of a process that started with your diagnostic LSAT. Schools with honest numbers survive the questions on this page; schools with marketing numbers don’t. Reading outcomes data skeptically isn’t cynicism, it’s the first legal skill.