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Influential California lawmakers are putting pressure on California’s state law bars to abandon new multi-choice questions after the collapse of the bar exam in February and return to the traditional July testing format.
“Given the February bar catastrophe, I think returning to the methods that have been in use for the past 50 years is a good way to go until we can properly test new methods.”
Thousands of candidates seeking to practice law in California are typically able to take the two-day bar exam in July. Returning to the national system at a national conference of judicial examiners that California has been using since 1972 would be a major hideaway for bars in the struggling state. This year, the new exam was rolled out as a “historical agreement” with cost-saving measures that would provide test takers with the option of remote testing.
Alex Chan, the attorney and chair of the Attorney General’s Committee on Lawyers and Attorney General, which oversees the California Judicial Examination, told the Times earlier this week that it is unlikely that state bars will return to the NCBE exam in July.
“We’re not back in NCBE, at least in the near future,” Chan said.
The security of NCBE exams does not allow any form of remote testing, Chan said in a recent survey on State Bar that nearly half of applicants in California bars want to maintain remote options.
Last year, financially bound state bars decided to cut costs by swapping test questions developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ Multi-Stateball Examination, where remote testing is not permitted. If State Bar created its own questions, they thought that all testers would save money by reducing the cost of renting a large exam lab.
State Bar hired vendor Meazure Learning to manage the exams and added a $8.25 million five-year contract that allowed the test preparation company Kaplan Exam Service to create multiple choices, essays and performance test questions.
However, after the failed development of new exams in February, after many test takers complained of a series of technical issues, glitches and irregularities, the state’s Supreme Court overseeing the state’s bars has directed them to plan the management of the July exam in a traditional interpersonal format.
The Supreme Court has not directed state bars to return to the NCBE system, despite the alleged test multiple choice questions that include typos and questions that rule out two or more correct answers and important facts.
This week, when state lawyers infuriated test takers and legal experts and revealed they had hired an ACS venture, it was revealed that they had hired an independent state psychologist who validated and graded the exams to ensure they were reliable to develop a small subset of multiple choice questions using artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been working hard to get into the world,” said Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco Law School. “They just showed they can’t do a fair test.”
On Friday, more than 12 deans of California’s California Accredited Act wrote to Patricia Guerrero, the Supreme Court of the California Supreme Court. The dean urges the court to release all 200 multiple-choice questions in the February exam, revealing the author’s identity for 29 questions that state bars do not belong to authors, and returning to the use of NCBE’s multi-step bar exam for the multiple-choice portion of the July exam.
“The bar exams are too important for them to experiment and continue to experiment as they did,” said Irwin Kemelinski, dean of Berkeley Law School, California, who signed the letter.
Former prosecutor Umberg drafted the question that he has non-scholars using artificial intelligence “for non-physicists who are designing questions with the help of AI to determine their qualification to become a surgeon.”
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Umberg has wielded considerable influence over the state bars. He recently promoted Senate Bill 40, a new law that requires state senators to confirm future appointments of state counsel executive director and legal counsel. After the February exam fiasco, Umberg submitted the law to begin an independent review of the exam by California auditors, looking into what happened “wonderfully wrong.”
The bill is scheduled to be reviewed at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 6, and along with Senate Bill 253, the State Attorneys Annual License Fee Approval Bill can be used by lawmakers to push state bars to make improvements.
Umberg said upcoming hearings exceed the control of the February bar exam.
“We’re going to look at leadership at the bar,” he said. “From an accountability and transparency perspective, we’ll look at what has happened since our last surveillance hearing.”
Asked if he was confident in Statebar’s leadership, Amberg said: “My confidence is being shaken.”
Umberg did not say whether State Bar executive director Leah Wilson should resign, but said the question was “one of the issues we will be discussing here in the coming months.”
The state bar announced this week that it would ask the Supreme Court to adjust the test scores for those who took the February bar exam.
For state critics, the problem is that they not only used AI to develop questions, but they did so without the knowledge of the California Supreme Court and the Board of Court Examiners.
State Bar told the Times in a statement that the decision to support ACS ventures with the support of the AI program was “made by staff within the admissions office and has not been clearly communicated to the leadership of the state bar.”
“This was a breakdown and structural changes were made in the admissions to address it,” Statebar said it created a new chief level role on admissions that report directly to the executive director and directly to “a new team structure to enhance accountability and effectiveness.”
At the same time, state bars downplayed the importance of hiring ACS ventures to develop questions, noting that “general support for bar exams, as recognized by CBE and the board, is subject to existing contracts.”
All multi-choice questions, including those “first developed with AI support,” were “then been reviewed by a content validation panel consisting of lawyers and lawyer subject experts as part of the question development and finalization process.”
Whatever happens next, state bars say they should take their time to ensure that the February bar exam fiasco doesn’t happen again.
“It’s really a test when people take the bar exam and prepare for more than three years,” Umberg said. “The fact that essentially Test Taker was a guinea pig in the bar in February is absolutely unacceptable.”
“That’s why,” Amberg said, “I’m going to go back to the old methodology here in July.”
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