the-california-bar-exam-is-a-disaster.-again!

The California Bar Exam Is a Disaster. Again!

If you’re planning to take the upcoming California bar exam, congratulations! You’re part of a grand tradition of applicants thrown into chaos by that state’s unique blend of poor planning, bureaucratic dithering, and a near-mystical ability to make a bad situation worse.

On that last count, remember that the upcoming, outside administered test is the product of the California bar exam hemorrhaging money like a midlevel associate buying rounds at a summer event. With this crackerjack budgeting, the bar examiners managed — surprisingly but somehow also predictably — to drive the program bankrupt. Rather than immediately seek a solution, they waited until close to the last minute, only to have state bar authorities and the California Supreme Court dither long enough that it crossed well beyond the last minute to produce the chaotic mess we’re in now.

In a vacuum, the decision to transition to a test produced by Kaplan and then administered by Meazure Learning is sound. Kaplan has a solid track record in bar exam prep and that includes writing sample questions that reliably reflect exam success. And most if not all of the California bar exam’s problems could be traced to its relationship with previous bar exam author, the National Conference of Bar Examiners — a non-profit with roughly $151 MILLION in net assets. Not only did the NCBE charge big fees, but it imposed rules upon state exams that stifled remote testing locations in favor of massive venues, which in California resulted in huge rental charges.  

And yet, we do not live in a vacuum. A transition of this magnitude needed a year (or two) lead time. Instead, it got about five months.

Tipsters report remote applicants unable to successfully take mock exams and left with no sense that a real one will even work. Not that things worked much better for the in-person examinees. The in-person exam portal wasn’t even functioning when it was supposed to open. Even when the online system works, there are accommodation concerns, as users can’t adjust font sizes for the essay box. So far, reports suggest the California bar is mostly rejecting those requesting paper copies of the exam for accommodation reasons.

But we might be getting ahead of ourselves… one applicant wrote ATL, “we don’t yet know where we are taking the exam.” Why worry about the in-person exam portal when applicants don’t even know WHERE they’re taking the in-person test? A Reddit post goes further, claiming that Meazure “lied about having several locations which led people to pick in person because they thought it would be close to home.” Another notes, “…it’s entirely unforeseeable to me that the convention center is the only option when Meazure Learning boasts that they have 1000+ testing locations….”

Getting out of giant convention centers was one of the primary selling points of this plan! Applicants are reporting that more convenient locations like Anaheim and Long Beach have disappeared since they first chose to take the test in-person. Instead, everyone in LA has to go to Ontario, which is… not LA. I’m not even sure LA residents consider it in the same time zone.

There are also concerns about Meazure’s proctoring, with complaints that applicants were unable to complete the exam in time or had to wait hours to take the mock exam and some were kicked out of the exam randomly with no explanation. Meanwhile, multiple applicants say help is impossible to find with the California officials directing everyone to Meazure Learning and Meazure directing everyone to California.

Thousands of applicants took part in a recent Q&A session with bar officials, hoping for clarity. They do not seem to have gotten it. Posts complain that the admins, who presumably had one job — explain how this test will work — couldn’t even answer basic questions like what applicants are allowed to bring to the exam.

One tipster delivered an understatement: “Does not feel well thought thru.”

All of this frustration is justified, but this rage shouldn’t be limited to this transition effort… it always sucks like this.

The new system promised more flexibility for in-person administration and seems to have, so far, failed. But this just puts them right back where they would be if they hadn’t made any changes at all. And examinees would be suffering through freezing conditions because no one figured out how to properly heat a stadium.

Proctoring issues? Remember when they ran an online exam during COVID and decided to arbitrarily flag one-third of applicants for cheating? The facial recognition software used by the bar seemed to think “suspicious behavior” meant being a human person sitting for a test. Some applicants were flagged for looking away from the screen, others for being too quiet — which is an odd standard to apply when the exam instructions explicitly tell you not to make noise. And what did the bar do? Rather than investigating the false positives themselves, they threw the burden on the applicants to “prove” they weren’t cheating.

While saving money was the impetus for the bar examiners making the change, we welcomed the move it because the previous system was so thoroughly broken. The issues might have been slightly different, but the impact on applicants was nonetheless inhumane. That doesn’t justify what’s happening to the current test-takers but when angry applicants post demands to undo the transition, bear in mind that the prior system wasn’t great either.

Instead of blasting the new guard and implicitly pining for the past, the pressure needs to be on the California authorities who allowed it to get to this point. Why was this done in less than half a year? Why didn’t state authorities or the courts either think ahead or develop a contingency for being late? Once this got pushed to the wall, why wasn’t there an emergency appropriation to let the test continue running in the red while the transition got smoothed out?

This whole mess could have been avoided if the bar had planned ahead instead of waiting until financial ruin forced their hand. If they’d transitioned to new providers over years instead of months, they might have actually pulled this off. Frankly, while it’s cold comfort to the current applicants, the new providers still might successfully pull this off…

Next February.


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.