The California Bar Exam essays are five one-hour written questions that test your ability to spot issues in a fact pattern, state the governing rule, apply it to the facts, and reach a conclusion. Together with the 90-minute performance test, the essays make up the written portion of the exam, which counts for 50 percent of your total scaled score out of 2000 points. You need a scaled score of at least 1390 to pass.
How the Essays Fit the Exam
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 100 in the morning and 100 in the afternoon. The MBE and the written day are weighted equally.
On the written day, you get three essays in a three-hour morning session and two more essays plus the performance test in a three-hour afternoon session. Each essay is designed to take about an hour. The performance test gives you a case file and a legal library and asks you to produce something practical, like a memo or a brief. Essays are scored on a raw scale of 40 to 100; the performance test runs 80 to 200.
Subjects the Essays Can Test
Fourteen subjects are fair game: 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 which subjects appear on your administration, so you have to prepare across all of them.
Some subjects come up far more than others. Professional Responsibility is the most frequently tested, and it usually appears blended with another subject rather than on its own. Evidence is another heavy hitter. California Civil Procedure has only appeared once since the State Bar began testing it. And do not assume a subject appears only once per sitting: Contracts, Professional Responsibility, and Real Property have each shown up twice on a single administration.
Crossover pairings are common. Expect to see Community Property with Wills, Contracts with Remedies, and Corporations with Professional Responsibility. A single prompt will often require you to analyze issues from two subjects at once, which is where candidates who studied each subject in isolation tend to lose points.
How Essays Are Scored
Each essay gets a raw score between 40 and 100. A 65 to 70 reflects competent, passing-quality work. To earn a 40 rather than a zero, you need to at least identify the correct subject and make some attempt to apply the law to the facts. A blank answer, or one that misses the subject entirely, gets a zero.
Graders care more about analysis than conclusion. A well-reasoned essay that reaches the “wrong” result will outscore a conclusory one that reaches the “right” result. Strong essays address the smaller sub-issues buried in the fact pattern, not just the obvious ones, and they explain why the law produces a particular outcome under these specific facts rather than reciting rules in the abstract.
The 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 you submitted goes through a complete second read by a different set of graders who do not see the first-round scores. The two sets of scores are averaged, and if the average reaches 1390, you pass. If it does not, the result is a fail.
The 40-point window exists because a handful of points on a single essay can decide whether you get admitted or retake the whole exam.
Writing a Passing Essay
Use IRAC: issue, rule, application, conclusion. California essays are sometimes called racehorse exams because you have to cover a lot of ground in 60 minutes. Clear subheadings for each issue help graders follow you and confirm you hit the key points.
Keep your rule, your analysis, and your conclusion in separate paragraphs. When they blur together, graders have to hunt for your reasoning, and that rarely helps you. State the rule in your own words, then pivot straight to the facts in the prompt. Quote or paraphrase those facts rather than speaking in abstractions.
The most common time mistake is spending too long on one major issue and running out of time for the others. Graders allocate points across all the issues in the prompt, so a brilliant analysis of one issue with nothing on three others will score lower than a competent but complete treatment of all four. Outline before you write. Two minutes of planning will catch issues you would otherwise miss.
Past Questions and Selected Answers
The State Bar publishes past essay questions with selected answers, and these are the single most valuable study resource available. The selected answers are not model perfect answers but actual high-scoring responses from past takers. Reading them shows you how much depth graders expect, how strong candidates organize their analysis, and which issues the examiners considered important enough to embed in the facts. The same page includes past performance tests with selected answers.
Fees, Laptop Registration, and the MPRE
The application fee for the general bar exam is $878. If you plan to type your answers, which most candidates do, there is a separate laptop registration fee of $153. 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 it can force you to handwrite or keep you from sitting at all. Candidates who want to handwrite must request approval and follow the State Bar’s instructions for physical materials. The exam is given in February and July.
Separately, California requires a passing score of 86 on the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination. The MPRE is scheduled independently of the bar exam and can be taken before or after it, but you must pass it before the State Bar will certify you for admission.