California Bar Exam Essays: Subjects, Timing, and Scoring

The California Bar Exam essays are five one-hour written questions administered on Day 1 of the two-day exam, alongside a 90-minute Performance Test. Together, the written portion counts for half of your total scaled score, and you need at least 1390 out of 2000 to pass.1The State Bar of California. California Bar Exam Grading About 55 percent of applicants passed the July 2025 administration.2The State Bar of California. State Bar Announces July 2025 Bar Exam Results

When the Essays Happen on Day 1

All five essays and the Performance Test fall on the first day. The morning session gives you three hours for essays 1, 2, and 3. After lunch, the afternoon session gives you three and a half hours for essays 4, 5, and the Performance Test. Day 2 is the Multistate Bar Examination, a separate 200-question multiple-choice test.3The State Bar of California. July 2026 California Bar Exam

Within each session, you choose the order and divide the time however you want. Each essay is designed for 60 minutes and the Performance Test for 90 minutes, but nothing forces you to stop at the suggested time. If essay 1 goes quickly, you can carry the extra minutes to a harder essay later in the same session. The flip side matters more in the afternoon: if the Performance Test runs long, it eats into your essay time, not the other way around.

For the July 2026 administration, testing falls on Tuesday, July 28, and Wednesday, July 29, with seating required by 8:20 a.m. both days.3The State Bar of California. July 2026 California Bar Exam

What Subjects the Essays Cover

Essays pull from a wide pool of federal and state subjects.4The State Bar of California. Scope of the California Bar Examination The core national subjects are:

  • Contracts
  • Torts
  • Real Property
  • Evidence
  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Law and Procedure
  • Civil Procedure

The California-specific subjects that round out the pool are Community Property, Wills and Succession, Trusts, Business Associations (corporations, partnerships, and LLCs), and Professional Responsibility. Professional Responsibility shows up with unusual frequency and is often woven into an essay on another topic rather than tested on its own.

Crossover Questions

Since the State Bar moved from six essays to five in July 2017, crossover fact patterns have become more common. One essay might test Community Property alongside Wills, or Corporations alongside Professional Responsibility. Don’t assume a question covers only one subject. Spotting the secondary issue hidden in the facts is often what separates a passing essay from a failing one.

Where California Law Diverges

Several subjects require you to know where California departs from federal rules. California has its own Evidence Code that differs from the Federal Rules on hearsay exceptions and privileges. California Civil Procedure differs from federal procedure on pleading standards and discovery. When a question calls for California law, applying the federal rule instead is a reliable way to lose points.

How to Write a Passing Essay

Graders read hundreds of essays per question and spend minutes, not hours, on each one. Your writing needs a structure that lets a grader find your analysis of each issue quickly.

IRAC, Issue by Issue

For every legal issue in the fact pattern, work through Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion:

  • Issue. Name the legal question in a short heading or topic sentence so the grader sees immediately what you’re addressing.
  • Rule. State the rule precisely, including the elements that define it. Graders are looking for specific legal vocabulary.
  • Application. This is where most of your points come from. Walk through each element against the specific facts. Don’t restate facts or recite law in the abstract.
  • Conclusion. State your answer. A wrong conclusion with strong analysis scores far better than a correct conclusion with no reasoning, but the conclusion still needs to exist.

Keep rule, application, and conclusion in separate paragraphs. When they run together, the grader has to work to find your reasoning, and that never helps you.

Using the Hour

A workable breakdown inside a single essay: 8 to 10 minutes reading the facts and the call of the question, 5 minutes outlining issues and the order you’ll address them, roughly 35 minutes writing, and the last 10 minutes tightening the analysis. The temptation is to start writing immediately. Resist it. The outline phase is where you catch the second or third issue buried in the facts, and missing an issue entirely hurts more than writing a shorter analysis of each one.

The Performance Test Shares the Day

The Performance Test is not an essay, but it sits in the same afternoon session and is scored as part of the written portion. Instead of testing memorized law, it gives you a case file and a library of legal authorities and asks you to produce a specific work product: a memo, a brief, a client letter, or another document a junior attorney might prepare. The 90-minute limit is tight for the amount of reading involved.4The State Bar of California. Scope of the California Bar Examination

The PT carries real weight: it counts the same as two individual essays in the scoring formula. A strong or weak PT can swing your written score meaningfully. The skill being tested is extracting rules from unfamiliar materials and applying them to facts while following the format instructions in the assignment memo. Ignoring those format requirements is one of the most common PT mistakes.

How Essays Are Scored

Each essay receives a raw score from 40 to 100, with 0 reserved for blank or completely non-responsive answers. Written scores are then scaled to account for differences in difficulty across administrations, so a 65 on a harder exam and a 65 on an easier one don’t necessarily reflect the same performance after scaling.

The written portion and the MBE each account for 50 percent of your total scaled score, and the passing total is 1390 out of 2000. The process has a built-in safety net. If your score after one reading lands between 1350 and 1389, a second set of graders reads your essays and the two readings are averaged. Below 1350 after the first reading, the exam is scored as a fail without a second read.1The State Bar of California. California Bar Exam Grading

Graders are organized into groups of around 12 experienced readers, with each group handling a specific question. High-scoring essays share certain traits: they identify all major issues and most sub-issues, state rules precisely, apply facts methodically rather than in broad strokes, and reach clear conclusions. Thorough analysis of each issue matters far more than a correct bottom-line answer.

Prepare With Past Essays

The State Bar publishes essay questions and selected answers from prior administrations on its website.5The State Bar of California. Past Exams The selected answers are real student responses that scored well, not model answers written by professors, so they show the level of detail and organization graders actually reward. The July 2025 publication, for example, includes all five essay questions with two selected answers each.6The State Bar of California. July 2025 California Bar Examination Essay Questions and Selected Answers Past Performance Tests with selected answers are published in the same place.

Use these materials by writing your own answer under timed conditions first, then comparing against the published responses. Focus on what issues you missed entirely rather than how polished your prose is. Catching the right issues and applying facts to rules beats elegant writing every time.