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Failed Rollouts from a New Exam for California Bars – A cash-bound agent could ultimately cost $5.6 million in the hopes of saving money.
Leah T. Wilson, executive director of state legislators, told state legislators at a Senate judicial hearing on Tuesday that he expects to pay Tecker about $3 million for the free trial.
Last week, Wilson announced he would resign when his term ended this summer, and announced he would find something “wonderfully wrong” during a 90-minute hearing called by Sen. Thomas J. Amberg (D-Orange), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Chaos continued in February as thousands of tests attempting to practice law in California sat for new exams. We reported that we were unable to log in to the exam due to repeated crashes on our online testing platform. Many experienced screen delays and error messages struggled to finish and save the essay, complained about multiple choice questions that were inappropriately expressed and included typos.
“The question is, how did you get to this place,” Umberg said at the beginning of the hearing. “And how do you avoid returning to this place?”
Last year, state bars were on the crisis of a financial crisis when they announced plans to develop a new bar exam. The 2024 budget forecasts a $3.8 million deficit for admissions funds, which deals with fees and costs associated with bar exam management. The fund warned that it faced bankruptcy in 2026.
The agency has planned to abandon the traditional national bar exam, which requires test takers to sit face to face and require them to develop their own exams that allow remote testing. The state bar promoted the plan as a “historical agreement” that saved up to $3.8 million a year.
It is unclear how much state bars will be able to pay next year if they return to their own test experiments. The costs may vary as they pursue a lawsuit against Meazure Learning, the vendor that managed the February test.
But the costs to state bars are more than just financial. After the exam’s fiasco, agents are facing embarrassment and a more scrutiny prospect of returning to the traditional in-person exam in July.
The Senate committee approved an independent review of the exam by California auditors after hearing from the February Test Taker, the dean of the law school and state law leaders.
Test trustee Andrea Lynch told lawmakers he faced constant confusion during the exams from a superintendent, technical glitches and computer crash. Near the end, as she was preparing to start the final section of the exam, she was presented with a message informing her that her exam had been submitted before she saw the questions.
“This was not a technical failure,” Lynch told lawmakers. “It was a systematic failure and a breakdown of integrity, accessibility and fairness, one of the most important professional milestones in the legal profession. It urges this committee to consider the implications of cases where tests are unable to reach their applicants when they were intended to support justice.”
The state’s attorney filed a civil complaint against Meazure Learning in Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing vendors of fraud, misrepresentation of negligence and breach of contracts by claiming that they could manage remote and in-person examinations in a two-day window.
But critics from the state bars argue that the agency’s leadership is responsible for not spending enough time developing new tests.
Jessica Berg, dean of the UC Davis School of Law, told lawmakers that state bars have come out of the bar exam and the lack of transparency throughout the process has caused economic and emotional harm to candidates, and significant financial and reputational harm to state bars and California.
“The questions we saw in the bar exam are absolutely predictable and depend on two parts of what’s going on here: the questions about the content of the exam and the management of the exam,” Berg said.
The hearing explored questions regarding multiple choice questions for the exam.
Two weeks ago, state bars measure the reliability of their exams and recommend scoring adjustments, revealed by an independent psychologist who is not a lawyer who drafted a subset of 29 multiple choice questions using artificial intelligence.
Under questions from Umberg, Wilson, executive director of State Bar, admitted that “no lawyer would assist in drafting the original.” She said she didn’t know that some questions had been drafted by the Chat GPT until after the exam.
Wilson also admitted that Statebar did not edit test questions before the exam.
Wilson said after the exam, “When I saw it on Reddit,” when he was asked when he learned there was a typo in some multiple choice questions.
Senator Amberg then raised new concerns: fairness in exam grading.
Statebar announced Monday that the February exam pass rate was 55.9%, the highest spring pass rate since 1965. In February last year, the pass rate was 33.9%, which was a significantly lower.
“I don’t think anyone here is interested in going back and revisiting this issue for the people who pass the bar, but what I mean is, there’s a problem with grading,” Amberg said.
“How do you explain this huge gap between what happened at the bar in February and what happened historically in terms of passing rates?” he asked.
Alex Chan, the counsel who chairs the Judiciary Committee of the State Bar Committee, said despite the bar exam questions, the grading process is strict and consistent with previous management. He attributed a high pass score to the California Supreme Court’s approval of the committee’s petition to lower the total raw pass scores of general bar exam candidates to more than 534 points on essays, performance tests and multiple choice questions.
“The scoring adjustments were not designed to be generous in any way,” Chan said. “They were designed to be fair and measured in light of circumstances and unprecedented, well-documented technical failures.”
Wilson also said that the February 2025 Test Takers scored higher average raw scores in bar exam writing than the 2024 or 2023 cohort. “This has no psychometric adjustments,” she said. “So we saw the apples on apples and these 2025 candidates performed better.”
“So this deviation is because they’re smarter,” Amberg said. “If the score didn’t drop, what was the passing rate?”
Statebar Admission Director Donna S. Hirschkowitz said the overall pass rate would be 46.9% (still significantly higher than usual) if the minimum pass score had not been reduced.
“I’m curious as to what will happen next year when we use the old format,” Umberg said. “In any case, to ensure that we’ve passed again — we’re not going to go back.”
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