“Bar Final Resit Failure Rate Jumps From 36.3% To 50.3%” — 983 Candidates Fail May 2026 Examination

…983 Fail, 885 Pass, 55 Get Conditional Pass
The Council of Legal Education, CLE, has announced that 983 candidates failed the May 2026 Bar Final Resit Examination, representing approximately 50.3 per cent of the 1,955 candidates who sat for the examination.
The results were approved at the Council’s Third Quarter Hybrid Meeting held on Thursday, August 13, 2026.
Secretary to the Council and Director of Administration, Aderonke O. Osho, disclosed the results in a public notice released on Monday.
According to the Council, 885 candidates passed the examination, while 55 recorded conditional passes.
A total of 983 candidates were listed as having failed, while 32 were absent and 19 results were withheld.
The Council stated that the examination recorded an overall pass rate of 45.3 per cent, while 54.7 per cent of candidates did not attain the prescribed pass mark.
The 983 candidates recorded as outright failures constitute about 50.3 per cent of the 1,955 candidates stated to have sat for the examination.
The result represents a significant increase in the proportion of candidates who failed when compared with the July 2025 Bar Final Resit Examination.
TheNigeriaLawyer had reported that 1,675 candidates participated in the July 2025 resit, with 674 candidates, representing 40.2 per cent, recording a pass, while 608 candidates, representing approximately 36.3 per cent, failed.
Comparing the two resit examinations, the outright failure rate rose from 36.3 per cent in 2025 to 50.3 per cent in 2026 — an increase of 14 percentage points.
Measured proportionately, that represents about a 38.6 per cent rise in the failure rate from the previous resit examination.
The number of candidates who failed also increased sharply from 608 in the 2025 resit to 983 in the May 2026 exercise, an additional 375 candidates.
The 2026 result, however, also recorded 885 direct passes, compared with 674 direct passes reported in the previous resit.
The latest resit performance is considerably below that of the regular December 2025 Bar Final Examination, where the Council announced an overall pass rate of 79.1 per cent out of 7,602 candidates.
That examination was, however, the regular Bar Final and not a resit, making the two categories of candidates materially different.
A closer examination of the figures released for the May 2026 resit also reveals an apparent numerical discrepancy in the Council’s published breakdown.
While the CLE stated that 1,955 candidates sat for the examination, adding the listed categories of 885 passes, 55 conditional passes, 983 failures, 32 absentees and 19 withheld results produces a total of 1,974.
This is 19 candidates more than the stated number of participants.
The notice did not clarify whether the 19 withheld results were already included in one of the other categories or whether the difference arose from a typographical error.
The Council nevertheless expressly stated that its overall pass rate was 45.3 per cent and that 54.7 per cent of candidates did not attain the prescribed pass mark.
Candidates who successfully complete the Bar Final Examination are required to undergo the prescribed screening and other processes before admission to the Nigerian Bar.
The Bar Final Examination is administered by the Nigerian Law School under the supervision of the Council of Legal Education and constitutes the final professional examination for prospective legal practitioners seeking admission to practise law in Nigeria.
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