California delays releasing results from troubled February bar exam
The State Bar of California will not be able release the much-anticipated results of the problem-plagued February bar exam on Friday as initially intended.
The bar had originally planned on calling for the state supreme court to rule on its request to drop the raw passing score to 534 from the psychometrician’s recommendation of 560 by April 28. However, the California Supreme Court had not received any petition from the Committee of Bar Examiners by Monday afternoon, a spokesman for the court confirmed.
The filing was completed yesterday, but according to an email sent to bar candidates Monday night obtained by the ABA Journal, that does not allow enough time for the court to consider the petition and release results by Friday, the email states.
“Of course, this disclosure would impact an appropriate remedy for the bar takers,” says Mary Basick, the assistant dean for academic skills at the University of California at Irvine School of Law. “And now the state bar has added even more uncertainty and stress to the February bar takers, who have been placed in an impossible situation through no fault of their own.”
“Every day late is one fewer day that students have to prepare for the July exam (since people reasonably wait to get their results from the prior exam before beginning to prepare for the next one),” writes Sean Silverman, owner of Silverman Bar Exam & LSAT Tutoring. “I’d have thought that all hands would have been on deck to get this petition in on time. I was wrong!”
The court’s consideration has been complicated by the revelation that nonlawyers had used artificial intelligence to draft some of the new exam’s multiple-choice questions. The court then asked the state bar to explain how and why AI was used and what efforts were taken to ensure the reliability of those questions, among other requests.
“The petition has taken longer than anticipated to finalize due to the need to ensure that the supreme court has all of the information it needs to fairly assess CBE’s recommendations,” according to the email sent to the February candidates. “It is important that we directly address concerns that have arisen regarding the multiple-choice questions specifically to make the best possible case for those recommendations, which will benefit all test-takers if adopted by the supreme court.”
In its move to a hybrid and remote exam prompted by financial issues, the state bar last summer signed a five-year, $8.25 million agreement with Kaplan to write the exam. Launched in February, the exam was plagued with widespread technical and administrative problems.
On May 5, the committee will discuss other options, including provisional licensure, a supervised practice pathway and special admissions for attorneys licensed in other states, according to an April 21 news release from the state bar.
More than 5,600 candidates originally had registered to take the new exam, but about 1,300 withdrew after the troubled run-up to the exam, according to the state bar.
Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.
