1. Home
2. Web First
3. As fallout rains down, California considers…

As fallout rains down, California considers return to in-person bar exam

By Julianne Hill

March 4, 2025, 9:02 am CST

Updated: The flurry of finger-pointing and attempts at rectifying the fallout from the disastrous February administration of California’s new bar exam continues, as the State Bar of California considers returning to an in-person administration for the July exam, scrutinizes its vendor’s failed performance for possible breach of contract, and faces a potential audit.

“Last week’s administration of the bar exam in California was a fiasco. It was made all the worse because it was foreseeable in advance,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and an ABA Journal contributor, to the Journal. “It was stunning incompetence by an entity that exists to ensure competence.”

On March 4, the California Supreme Court directed the state bar “to plan on administering the July 2025 California Bar Examination in the traditional in-person format,” in a statement.

The state supreme court earlier asked the state bar and Meazure Learning for a detailed report about the myriad issues experienced by applicants to “provide appropriate remedies for affected applicants who deserved and expected better.”

Unlike the widely used Uniform Bar Examination and its components 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 saving money to ease an anticipated $3.8 million deficit.

According to the state bar’s board of trustees’ agenda for its March 5 meeting, the state bar’s staff “cannot recommend going forward with Meazure Learning and are instead recommending returning to the in-person administration” for the July exam. The memo was posted March 2 by Donna Hershkowitz, the state bar’s chief of admissions and legislative director.

A Feb. 28 state bar fact sheet enumerates the host of issues that the bar candidates experienced, including the inability to use copy and paste functions in the performance test, being kicked off the platform and unable to reenter without restarting the exam and being unable to connect at all, and delays of 90 minutes before starting the multiple-choice section of the test.

Meazure Learning is under review by the state bar after widespread technical delays and glitches affecting in-person and remote test-takers, according to a March 3 statement, and the state bar is “closely scrutinizing whether Meazure Learning met its contractual obligations.”

In September, the board of trustees had approved up to $4.1 million for Meazure Learning’s administration for the February and July exams, according to the agenda memo. Democratic California State Sen. Tom Umberg, chair of the California Senate Judiciary Committee, recently called for an audit of the state bar’s handling of the February bar exam.

The state bar also is working to “determine the full scope of necessary remediation measures for February 2025 bar exam test-takers,” according to the bar’s March 3 statement.

“As we identify what went wrong and where accountability rests, our priority is to apply proven methods from past disrupted exams to ensure a fair February bar exam for the current cohort and a smooth administration of the July bar exam,” said Brandon Stallings, the chair of the state bar’s board of trustees, in the March 3 statement.

Last week, a group of examinees filed a class action complaint in the Northern District of California against ProctorU Inc. alleging that the vendor “failed spectacularly” to administer to the test through its Meazure Learning unit. On March 3, ProctorU was hit by a similar, second class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California filed by a bar candidate who alleges that the company was aware of the software’s failings but failed to rectify the glitches.

Concerns about the administration of the new test started before the Feb. 25 and 26 administration.

The board of trustees heard about the issues surrounding the Meazure Learning platform’s functionality at its Feb. 21 meeting. That followed a Sept. 17 letter from 15 ABA-accredited law school deans to court expressing “grave concerns” about administration of the new hybrid exam.

Law school deans continue to be frustrated. On March 3, the deans again wrote to California Supreme Court Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and the state supreme court recommending that candidates work under the supervision of experienced attorneys to “allow candidates with offers of employment contingent on bar passage to retain them,” according to the letter.

Noting that the July exam is “fewer than five months away,” the California law deans urged the “return to an in-person administration of the Multistate Bar Examination.” A second letter signed March 3 by more than 40 law school deans outside California, including those from the University of Washington School of Law, the Duke University School of Law and the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, echoed their California peers’ recommendations.

The NCBE administers the Multistate Bar Examination.

“We stand ready to help in any way we can, but we have not heard from the California bar staff or board,” wrote Judith Gundersen, the president of the NCBE, in email to the Journal on Monday.

A Kaplan spokesman declined to comment to the Journal. Meazure Learning did not immediately respond to a Journal email.

California tests the second-highest number of bar examinees, according to the NCBE, behind only New York.

See also:

Fail this week’s California bar exam? Retake the July test for free

Apologizing for ‘frustration, confusion,’ California offers refunds to February bar examinees

Updated March 4 at 12:29 p.m. to add the California Supreme Court’s statement.

Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.