After California bar exam mess in February, July's test will cost millions more, official says
May 7 (Reuters) - California's botched February bar exam will cost the State Bar of California almost $6 million more than expected in July, with millions in added expenses in the years to come, officials told state lawmakers on Wednesday.
The State Bar's decision to switch to its own bar exam, given both remotely and in person, was expected to save the state bar up to $3.8 million a year. But the problem-plagued February exam and its fallout are now a financial drain on the already cash-strapped state bar. February examinees faced unprecedented technical and logistical problems on the test and the state is returning to its traditional in-person exam in July.
The state bar expects to lose about $3 million in revenue because it is waiving the July testing fees for those who failed or withdrew from the February exam, executive director Leah Wilson told the state's Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on a bill, opens new tab that would mandate a state audit of the February test. Wilson said on Friday that she is stepping down from her state bar post in July, citing the faulty rollout of the new exam.
The bar will spend an additional $2 million to secure large testing sites for the July exam after the California Supreme Court ordered that test to be given only in person.
And returning to the Multistate Bar Exam — the 200 multiple-choice questions developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners — will cost the bar an additional $620,000 in July, Wilson said. The high court on Friday ordered the bar to return to the MBE for the July test after legal academics and test takers questioned the quality and development process of the multiple-choice questions that appeared on the February exam.
Additionally, the state bar must pay test prep company Kaplan Exam Services $6.1 million more before it can exit the five-year contract it entered into last year to provide multiple-choice questions for the bar exam, even if it does not use Kaplan-produced questions, Wilson told the committee. The state bar revealed two weeks ago that due to time constraints, a subset of the February multiple-choice questions were written by a separate contractor using ChatGPT.
On Monday, the state bar sued testing platform Meazure Learning for unspecified damages, claiming the company failed to live up to its promises that its systems could handle thousands of bar examinees. Meazure said on Tuesday that the state bar was trying to "shift the blame for its flawed development process for the February exam." The company declined to comment further on Wednesday.
State bar officials previously had said there would be added costs following the February bar's failure but had given significantly lower estimates.
The hearing also included testimony from four February bar takers, as well as several legal academics who said the development of the exam was rushed and that bar exam experts were excluded from that process.
'How do we make sure we never come back to this place?' said California's Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Tom Umberg, who sponsored the audit bill. 'It's important that we dig deep into this issue.'
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