Friday, July 10, 2026
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Audit Blames State Bar’s Poor Planning for Problematic February 2025 Bar Exam
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
California State Auditor Grant Parks yesterday released a report on the administration of the problem-riddled February 2025 bar exam, saying in an accompanying letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and others that the State Bar had “poorly implemented certain changes” to the test, including a novel remote option that was hailed as a cost-saving measure, causing “a negative effect on test takers” and resulting in lost revenue to the cash-strapped body.
Blaming poor planning in the lead-up to the examination, issues with question validation protocols, insufficient guardrails on the use of generative artificial intelligence in drafting inquiries, and weak evaluation systems for validating vendor capabilities for administering the test, the report notes that “[t]he State Bar has implemented changes…that address some of the findings” but that “additional areas” need improvement.
Attorney-hopefuls sitting for the February 2025 exam—which was administered by Meazure Learning and utilized questions prepared by Kaplan Exam Services as well as ones produced by ACS Ventures LLC using generative AI tools—complained of system crashes, computer problems, proctor issues, and confusing questions.
The California Supreme Court ultimately approved scoring adjustments for examinees, resulting in a nearly 65.3% passing rate, up from 33.9% the previous year and similar percentages in 2022 and 2023.
Yesterday’s report was issued in response to an amendment to Business and Professions Code §6145, signed into law last October, that requires the office to conduct an audit “to evaluate the administration of the February 2025 bar exam and how the problems with the exam occurred.”
New Vendor Relationship
Noting that the State Bar’s decision to move forward with a virtual option required it to find a new company to generate multi-state exam questions as the previous vendor, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”), mandated in-person testing, the audit report faulted the body for failing to give adequate time to allow for the development of the inquiries.
The report points out that the State Bar had initiated discussions with Kaplan about developing the multiple-choice questions as early as December 2023 but failed to secure an agreement until August 2024, leaving the vendor with just six months to complete the entire process of developing and validating questions—a process NCBE has described as taking up to three years to complete.
An experimental test could not be pulled off until November 2024, after the deadline NCBE gave for reverting to an in-person test and using the questions drafted by the historic vendor.
State Bar employees also failed to specify in the contract with Kaplan the mandated subtopics within each of the seven subjects to be evaluated on the exam, which resulted in a shortage of questions on certain issues that needed to be covered on the test. Once the content gap was discovered, the attorney-licensing body reached out in September to ACS Ventures in September, the psychometric company hired to assess the test, to help with additional drafting.
AI-Generated Questions
ACS Ventures drafted questions for the November experiment using AI programs, 29 of which made it onto the February 2025 bar exam.
Although the State Bar’s contract with Kaplan limited the vendor’s ability to use AI tools in the development of inquiries for the exam—including terms demanding notice and that “[h]umans shall conceive, execute, and actually form the elements of authorship” in any test materials—no such guardrails were laid out in the agreement with ACS Ventures.
Finding that then-Director of the Office of Admissions Audrey Ching, who left that post in October 2025, had discussed the use of AI programs with ACS Ventures but failed to inform the executive director or other State Bar leadership of the decision to use the vendor or that the questions would be created through the use of generative tools, the report says:
“The State Bar still lacks a policy that defines substantive changes and requires staff to escalate decisions on them to executive leadership. However, the State Bar is working to develop a framework it says will ultimately address this issue by July 2026.”
Industry Standards
Highlighting that the body had also not followed “industry standards for selecting” the individuals would sit on the content-validation panels and had only retained a single subject-matter expert to review all of the questions on the exam, yesterday’s report concludes that the State Bar did not adequately ensure the quality of the multiple-choice questions.
Noting that “the admissions office states that it initially selected panelists by contacting individuals they had previously worked with or knew through professional networks and law school contacts,” the report points out that “panel composition reflected an inconsistent and informally derived mix of credentials,” including one individual whose license was in inactive status. The report says:
“The State Bar has begun strengthening its oversight of bar exam development, but its actions have not yet resolved all weaknesses we identified in its processes….[T]he State Bar has not yet implemented a policy requiring staff to defer decisions on substantive changes to executive leadership or appropriate governing bodies. It expects to address this gap by July 2026. Until then, there is a continued risk that the executive director, chief of admissions, and other senior leaders could again be uninformed about substantive changes during bar exam development.”
Costs of Failures
The report adds:
“Despite its intent to reduce bar exam expenses, the State Bar did not achieve cost savings in its administration of the February 2025 bar exam. From 2022 to 2024, the State Bar spent an average of $7.7 million annually [for two] bar exams. The February 2025 bar exam alone has cost the State Bar $5.1 million, not including the costs of pending legal matters. In addition, the State Bar experienced at least $4 million in lost revenue as a result of remedies it provided to February 2025 test takers, including exam refunds and fee waivers. The State Bar has increased certain fees in an effort to cover these costs and to keep the Admissions Fund solvent through 2028.”
Turning to the selection of Meazure Learning to administer the exam, the auditor said that the problems encountered by test-takers during the February exam were similar to known issues encountered by other examinees using the vendor’s online platform. The report finds:
“Rather than ensuring that Meazure Learning addressed these problems, the State Bar relied heavily on Meazure Learning’s assurances that it could administer the bar exam effectively.”
Acknowledging that, “[i]n the aftermath of the February 2025 bar exam, the Supreme Court, Board, Committee, and State Bar took steps to strengthen the process for procuring vendors to administer the bar exam,” the report concludes that “the State Bar has substantially addressed our concerns about how it selected Meazure Learning.”
State Bar Comments
The State Bar responded to the report in a press release issued yesterday, saying:
“While the State Bar agrees with the audit’s recommendations, in its response to the auditor on June 18, 2026, the State Bar noted that it had disagreements with certain findings of the report. The State Bar did not address those concerns in light of ongoing litigation with Proctor U, Inc., dba Meazure Learning, its contracted vendor for the administration of the in-person and remote February 2025 bar exam.”
In January, the State Bar Board of Trustees and the Committee of Bar Examiners jointly voted to explore adopting the so-called “NextGen Uniform Bar Examination,” created by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”), as the exclusive metric for evaluating attorney-hopefuls. The test is designed to create a “portable score” that is transferable to other states while allowing each jurisdiction to set its own threshold for passing.
The California Supreme Court will have the final say on using the metric.
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