Bar Exam
Furious bar candidates square off with State Bar of California in wake of flubbed exam
Testimonies from examinees detailed delayed start times, rude proctors, technical glitches, grammatical and factual errors in the questions, rampant cheating, and a host of distractions—including proctors arguing and fellow test-takers screaming out of frustration. (Image from Shutterstock)
For two hours, February bar candidates unleashed their fury about the chaos surrounding last week’s administration of California’s new bar exam and demanded remediation, including an offer of provisional licenses, a lowering of the pass score and automatic passage during a March 5 meeting of the State Bar of California Board of Trustees.
Testimonies from examinees detailed delayed start times, rude proctors, technical glitches, grammatical and factual errors in the questions, rampant cheating, and a host of distractions—including proctors arguing and fellow test-takers screaming out of frustration.
One test taker told the board he took the exam at a San Francisco convention center with 1,500 others and said as the internet went in and out of service. “We would have a lot of people crying, a lot of people screaming and yelling, and the proctors wouldn’t be able to quiet that down,” he said. “Any psychometric analysis doesn’t take those factors into account because no other bar administration exam had students take the test under those conditions. A score remedy needs to be the most drastic in the history of the California State Bar.”
The owner of a bar prep company said he “had a student that traveled from Africa and spent his village’s money to get here, take an exam and then be told the retake will be on the third [of March] because none of his information was entered.” The retake has been rescheduled to March 18 and 19.
One candidate who traveled from Spain to take the exam said: “My solution is to provide unconditional licenses, not conditioned to taking the bar, but to working under the supervision of an attorney.”
The board, however, did not commit to any solutions Wednesday, and it will wait until after the exam is graded and it has consulted with its psychometrician, said Leah Wilson, the State Bar of California’s executive director.
Unlike the widely used Uniform Bar Examination, which is administered and developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the new hybrid test, written by Kaplan Exam Services and deployed by Meazure Learning, was designed to be taken remotely and at test centers. The state bar’s decision this fall to launch a new exam was motivated by its need to save money in order to ease an anticipated $3.8 million deficit.
Of the 5,600 candidates originally registered to take the new exam Feb. 25 and 26, about 1,300 withdrew, Donna Hershkowitz, the State Bar of California’s chief of mission advancement and accountability, said at the meeting.
Only 86 test-takers met the state bar’s criteria to be eligible for the optional March 18 and 19 retake, according to an email shared with the ABA Journal. The criteria included being completely unable to launch the bar exam in the Meazure Learning platform; having fewer than four successfully submitted written responses, including essays and/or the performance test; being unable to access the multiple-choice questions; or not having submissions for two or more multiple-choice sessions.
Shara Darden, a December graduate of Southwestern Law School, was one of the lucky ones offered a retake.
On the exam’s first day, she was disconnected during the fourth essay but could not reconnect despite contacting more than 10 tech support personnel, borrowing a computer and switching Wi-Fi networks. She accepted the retake offer.
Still, she has questions for the board. “There was a sentence in the notice that I got: ‘If you attempt to take the exam using the same computer equipment or connect to the same network, we fear that you may face the same obstacles to completing the exam.’ So now do I need a new computer?” she asks.
And as of Wednesday afternoon, Darden, a mother of three who left her career as a public relations professional to attend law school, told the Journal she did not know if she would be taking the entire bar exam or only the portions she could not access during the February administration.
Law school deans across California heard that between 65% to 90% of their graduates sitting for the exam had experienced issues, Martin Pritikin, dean of Purdue Global Law School, said during the public comment session.
Hershowitz acknowledged there was a “disconnect” between the stories told and the data supplied from Meazure, which stated that 98% of all submitted exams had some content on all six written components and fewer than 1% had no content on three or more components. The data did not examine the quality of the answers, she added.
The board members discussed how the state supreme court would need to approve moves such as changing the pass score, provisional licensure or diploma privilege.
Meanwhile, the July 29-30 administration of the bar exam, originally planned to be held in hybrid format, will be held in person, following the March 4 directive from the California Supreme Court “to plan on administering the July 2025 California Bar Examination in the traditional in-person format.”
No decision was made on what test would be used going forward.
The state bar needs to find locations to accommodate the thousands of anticipated test-takers, said Audrey Ching, the bar’s director of the office of admissions. Applications for the July administration are currently not available on the state bar’s website.
There is “some surplus in the admissions fund in the adopted 2025 budget” that can help offset the cost of returning to in-person exams, Wilson said.
“Right now, it’s a commitment to ensuring the smooth July administration, understanding that we can pay the bills for July. Costs for pivoting once again should not be the first concern.”
Typically, far more candidates sit for July exams than the February administrations. In 2024, 3,944 examinees took the California bar exam in February while 8,291 sat for the July exam, according to the NCBE.
California tests the second-highest number of bar examinees, behind only New York, according to the NCBE.
“I just want to tell the members of the public, we are acknowledging the comments that you made today,” said Raymond Buenaventura, a board member. “We heard you. I want you to know that we’re asking questions. We’re very much interested and concerned.”
See also:
As fallout rains down, California considers return to in-person bar exam
California bar hunts for who leaked bar questions, applicants sue test administrator
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