[gnicholas]

The CA bar exam used the be much harder than other states'. They lowered the pass threshold several years ago, and then reduced the length from 3 days to 2. Now it's probably much more in line with the national norms. Depending on when you took the sample exam, it might be much easier now.

Also, sometimes sample exams are made extra difficult, to convince students that they need to shell out thousands of dollars for prep courses. I recall getting 75% of questions wrong on some sections of a bar prep company's pre-test, which I later realized was designed to emphasize unintuitive/little-known exceptions to general rules. These corners of the law made up a disproportionate number of the questions on the pre-test and gave the impression that the student really needed to work on that subject.