The California bar exam essays are five one-hour written questions that ask you to spot issues in a dense fact pattern, state the governing rules, apply them to the facts, and reach a conclusion. They can pull from 14 subject areas, each answer is scored from 40 to 100, and together with the 90-minute performance test they make up 50 percent of your total scaled score out of 2,000 points. You need a 1390 to pass.1
What the Essays Look Like on Exam Day
The general bar exam runs two days. Day one is the written portion. Day two is the Multistate Bar Examination, 200 multiple-choice questions split into morning and afternoon sessions of 100 each. The written day and the MBE day carry equal weight.
On the written day, the morning session gives you three hours for three essays. The afternoon session gives you another three hours for two more essays plus the 90-minute performance test. Each essay is built for roughly 60 minutes. The performance test hands you a case file and a legal library and asks for a practical work product like a memo or brief; it is scored on a raw scale of 80 to 200, while each essay runs on a raw scale of 40 to 100.
The 14 Subjects and What Gets Tested Most
Essays can draw from Business Associations, Civil Procedure (federal and California), Community Property, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Professional Responsibility, Real Property, Remedies, Torts, Trusts, and Wills and Succession. You will not know in advance which subjects appear on your administration.
Some subjects show up far more often than others. Professional Responsibility is the most frequently tested, and it typically appears blended with another subject like corporations or criminal law rather than standing alone. Evidence is another heavy presence. California Civil Procedure has appeared only once since the State Bar began testing it. And do not assume each subject is capped at one essay per sitting: Contracts, Professional Responsibility, and Real Property have each appeared twice on a single administration.
Common crossover pairings include Community Property with Wills, Contracts with Remedies, and Corporations with Professional Responsibility. A single prompt often demands analysis across two or more subjects, so studying each subject in isolation without practicing how they intersect is where points bleed out.
How Each Essay Is Scored
Each essay receives a raw score between 40 and 100. Roughly 65 to 70 reflects competent, passing-quality work. To earn a 40 instead of a zero, you have to at least identify the correct subject and make some attempt to apply law to facts. Blank answers, or answers that miss the subject entirely, receive a zero.
Graders weigh analysis far more heavily than the conclusion. A well-reasoned answer that reaches the “wrong” result will outscore a conclusory answer that reaches the “right” one. What separates strong essays from mediocre ones is coverage of both the major issues and the smaller sub-issues buried in the fact pattern, and explaining why the law produces a particular outcome under those specific facts rather than reciting rules in a vacuum.
The 1350 to 1389 Second-Read Window
After the first round of grading, applicants with a total scaled score of 1390 or higher pass. Those below 1350 fail. If your score lands between 1350 and 1389, every written answer goes through a full second read by a different set of graders who cannot see the first-round scores. The two sets of scores are averaged. If the average reaches 1390, you pass. If it does not, the result is a fail.
Writing an Essay That Scores
The standard structure is IRAC: issue, rule, application, conclusion. California essays are often called “racehorse” exams because you have to cover a lot of ground in 60 minutes. Clear subheadings for each issue help graders track your analysis and confirm you have hit the required points.
Keep your rule, analysis, and conclusion in separate paragraphs. When rule and analysis blur together, graders have to hunt for your reasoning, and that rarely helps. State the rule in your own words, then move straight to the specific facts from the prompt. Quote or paraphrase those facts directly instead of speaking in abstractions.
The most common failure mode is spending too much time on one big issue and running out of time for the rest. Graders allocate points across every issue embedded in the prompt, so a brilliant treatment of one issue paired with nothing on three others will score lower than a competent but complete treatment of all four. Outline before you write. Even two minutes of planning surfaces issues you would otherwise miss.
Past Questions and Selected Answers
The State Bar publishes past essay questions along with selected answers on its website, and these are the single most useful study resource available. The selected answers are not model perfect answers; they are responses that earned high scores from actual exam takers. Reading them shows how much depth graders expect, how top scorers organize their analysis, and which issues the examiners treated as important enough to embed in the facts. The same page also posts past performance tests with selected answers.
Fees, Laptop Registration, and the MPRE
The application fee to sit for the general bar exam is $878. A separate laptop registration fee of $153 applies if you plan to type your answers, which most candidates do. Laptop users must download ExamSoft’s testing software and complete a mandatory mock exam before the deadline to confirm their system works. For the July 2026 exam, the mock exam and laptop registration deadline is July 24, 2026. Missing that deadline can force you to handwrite or, in some cases, prevent you from sitting at all.
California also requires a passing score of 86 on the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination. The MPRE is scheduled separately, can be taken before or after the bar exam, and must be passed before the State Bar will certify you for admission. The bar exam itself is administered twice a year, in February and July.
Recent Pass Rates
The July 2025 general bar exam had an overall pass rate of 54.8 percent, with first-time takers passing at 69.7 percent. Repeat takers pass at meaningfully lower rates. These figures reflect the exam after the California Supreme Court lowered the passing scaled score from 1440 to 1390 and restored the MBE. Roughly half of test-takers failing on any given administration is a reminder that the essays reward genuine timed practice, not just familiarity with the rules. The candidates who struggle most tend to know the law but have not written enough essays under exam conditions.