Hundreds of students have registered to re-sit bar school exams next month – but the regulator says early signs suggest performance is ‘broadly in line’ with last year.

According to figures released by the regulator, a total of 384 candidates have registered for the October sit of the criminal litigation exam, 435 for the civil litigation exam, and 299 for the professional ethics exam. Approximately 2,200 students were due to sit the August assessments.

Students on the Bar Professional Training Course were required to decide whether or not to retake the exams before knowing whether they had passed. The BSB told the Gazette that the August exam results could not be released sooner for quality assurance reasons.

However, at a BSB meeting yesterday, director general Mark Neale said he had seen ‘very preliminary’ indications of the range of awards in the civil and criminal litigation exams which indicated that ‘the range of performance sis broadly in line with previous years, which I think is encouraging’.

Earlier this month, the regulator admitted that signficantly more students had been affected by technical glitches during their August bar exams than originally estimated.