On his second attempt at the notoriously tough California bar exam in February, Zack Defazio-Farrell was confident about his prospects.
The University of San Diego Law School graduate had spent five weeks preparing to retake the test and opted for a new remote option. He sat down at his laptop, scanned his desk and workspace for the proctor who would monitor his exam, and got started. Within minutes, things started to go amiss.
“The software is really laggy and glitchy,” Defazio-Farrell said. “I would be typing and it would freeze a lot, or the text would lag. Meanwhile the timer’s running, so I thought oh, I’m behind.”
He wasn’t alone. Thousands of other test-takers struggled to log in, cut and paste text, and manage crashing software provided by the new testing firm, Meazure Learning.
“It was a complete disaster in every sense of the word,” Defazio-Farrell said.
The next day, the keyboard wouldn’t log his keystrokes. Defazio-Farrell contacted tech support, which rebooted his computer three times while he waited for hours. In the end, he was unable to complete all of the essays or the performance test, a written skills exercise.
When Defazio-Farrell tried to log in during a one-hour scheduled window to start his multiple-choice questions, he got a message stating that he had missed his appointment. Later, after hours of phone calls and messages to test administrators, he was finally able to complete that part of the exam.
“I knew there was a good shot that I failed,” Defazio-Farrell said. “I thought, I don’t even know if they’re going to be able to grade this.”
He checked on Reddit to compare notes with fellow test-takers and found even more instances of testing mishaps.
“There were stories of people who logged out of their exam, then got logged into someone else’s exam,” he said. “People whose proctors submitted their exams before they were finished. At one time, there was an outage that affected everyone.”
In March, the State Bar of California launched an investigation and announced that the California Supreme Court called for a report on the problems.
“Unfortunately, the new testing platform combined with a new method for developing multiple-choice questions contributed to an unacceptable experience for many test takers,” State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson wrote in an email to Voice of San Diego. “They deserved better, and we continue to apologize for the difficulties many experienced.”
Then, in April, it got worse. The State Bar acknowledged that the exam included test questions written by artificial intelligence under the auspices of ACS Ventures, a psychometric company that works with testing agencies in education, credentialing, and licensure.
Defazio-Farrell wasn’t surprised. He said some of the exam questions were poorly worded and nonsensical. He had completed about 1,000 practice questions in preparation for this exam. Some of the February test questions bore little resemblance to standard examples or established legal concepts.
“I thought, I don’t know how I could provide an answer to this,” he said. “They were very odd. There were typos. It was very, very bizarre.”
Legal experts said that the questions should be written and vetted by attorneys, so relying on bots to draft them is an exceptional breach of protocol.
“The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California Irvine School of Lawtold the Los Angeles Times. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”
Wilson acknowledged that failure and said “it was inappropriate for this to have occurred without the requisite approvals or levels of transparency, and it will not happen again.”
She said, however, that the AI-generated questions went through legal review before being included in the exam.
In April, the State Bar called for adjusting exam scores to offset the software failures. It recommended lowering the minimum passing score for the entire exam and “imputing” credit for missing questions by assigning values based on scores of completed answers. And it sued Meazure Learning, the vendor that administered the failed exam.
Last week, the State Bar suggested another remedy: extending an option for “provisional licensure” for law students who failed or withdrew from the disrupted exam. That would allow them to work under an experienced attorney until they pass the bar exam, if the state Supreme Court approves the proposal.
Despite the snafus he experienced on the exam, Defazio-Farrell ultimately passed it. He’s preparing to be sworn in and is interviewing with law firms. But he says the testing blunders highlight outdated features of the California bar exam, which stresses rote memorization over the problem-solving and research skills that attorneys rely on in practice.
He thinks provisional licensure is a more practical option, along with related systems such as legal apprenticeships or portfolio exams, which would enable would-be attorneys to work under supervision and then submit samples of their actual work product for grading. Making the bar exam work better for aspiring attorneys could also make legal assistance more accessible for Californians, he said.
“I think the state bar has to do a lot of soul searching,” Defazio-Farrell said. “The legal industry in California is incredibly inaccessible and expensive. And this (bar exam) is part of the reason why. This keeps people out and it keeps lawyers making a lot of money at the public’s expense.”
State Seeks to Close $12 Billion Budget Gap
California is facing a $12 billion shortfall in the revised budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom released Wednesday, driven by what Newsom called the “Trump slump” of “tariffs disruption, market volatility, and a decline in international tourism.”
“California is under assault, the United States of America in many respects is under assault, because we have a president that’s been reckless in terms of assaulting those growth engines and has created a climate of deep uncertainty,” Newsom said.
Republicans blamed Newsom for the shortfall, which they said is caused by state overspending, CalMatters reported.
To close the budget gap, Newsom has proposed restricting Medi-Cal access to undocumented immigrants to save $5 billion. Members of the Latino Legislative Caucus oppose the move, but Republicans are saying “We told you so.”
“We warned him,” California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones said in a statement. “I urged the governor to immediately freeze his reckless Medi-Cal expansion for illegal immigrants a year and a half ago, before it buried our healthcare system and bankrupted the state.”
The Sacramento Report runs every Friday. Do you have tips, ideas or questions? Send them to me at deborah@voiceofsandiego.org.
The state government that has, not once, but twice, failed at upgrading the DMV computer system, and has made Hi-Speed Rail a punchline, has now failed when they attempted to upgrade the Bar Exam technology. Why is anyone surprised?
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