We ARE getting results on Friday… right?!
Just when you thought this couldn’t get any worse…
On Friday, April 18, the Cal Bar’s Committee of Examiners decided to reduced the raw passing score on the February 2025 Cal Bar Exam from 560 to 534. Problem? The Cal Bar can’t do that unilaterally. It must file a petition to the California Supreme Court. If the Court approves (ideally before April 28, so that the Cal Bar could implement those changes in results letters), then the Cal Bar felt that it could still publish results on time, on May 2.
Sooooooo…. the Cal Bar didn’t exactly file that petition on April 18.
Then, last week, the Cal Bar revealed that its psychometric vendor, ACS Ventures, used artificial intelligence to craft 23 of the 200 multiple choice questions that applicants saw on the February exam. In addition, 48 questions were taken from the Cal Bar’s bank of questions for the First-Year Law Students’ Exam (aka, the Baby Bar, which consists of 100 contracts, crim, and torts MBEs). Kaplan, you know, the firm that received all that money to create the MBE questions, drafted only 100 of the 200 questions. No word on who drafted the 29 questions deemed to be experimental and which were not graded.
Remember, the Cal Bar said it would file its petition with the Court on April 18. As I said, it didn’t happen. Then, the Cal Supreme Court found about the non-lawyer psychometrician drafting MBE questions with AI just like the rest of us, via press release (trust me, the justices were NOT amused, on multiple levels). Then, last Thursday, on April 24, the Cal Supreme Court issued a statement: “Because the court was not made aware of the use of AI to draft some of the multiple-choice questions for the February bar exam, the court has asked the State Bar, in its petition regarding the scoring of the exam, to explain to the court how and why AI was used to draft, revise, or otherwise develop certain multiple-choice questions, efforts taken to ensure the reliability of the AI-assisted multiple-choice questions before they were administered, the reliability of the AI-assisted multiple-choice questions, whether any multiple-choice questions were removed from scoring because they were determined to be unreliable, and the reliability of the remaining multiple-choice questions used for scoring.” As of Friday, April 25, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Cal Bar hadn’t sent its petition to the Court regarding lowering the passing score for the February 2025 exam. This is probably because the Court asked the Cal Bar to address how and why they used the 200 questions they used for the MBE on the February 2025 exam.
NOW it comes to pass that tonight, Monday night, April 28, the Cal Bar sent applicants an email: the Cal Bar still hadn’t filed the petition that it was going to file on April 18. The Bar said that “we anticipate doing so tomorrow, on April 29. The timing of our petition submission will not give the Court much time to rule in a manner that allows us to apply the scoring recommendations adopted by the Court and then release February Bar Exam results on May 2. There may therefore be a slight delay in releasing results.” (emphasis mine).
And, at the end of the email, the Cal Bar said that it is “committed to sharing exam results as soon as we are able.”
Unprecedented, this. The Cal Bar results may not publish on time. We’ll see when the Cal Bar files its petition. We’ll see how quickly the Cal Supreme Court rules on the petition. Remember, the Cal Bar cannot control the Cal Supreme Court in any way: what it decides, or when it decides. Do you think the Supreme Court will adjust the cut score given the Cal Bar’s fundamental alteration of the MBE, by allowing non-lawyers to use AI to generate MBE questions? Not to mention the use of seemingly easier questions (48 questions for a 1L exam used on a Cal Bar exam), which may have been deliberately used to improve student performance to dilute the impact of Kaplan’s inability to deliver more than 50% of what it promised to do?
Either way, as the Cal Bar said, “there may therefore be a slight delay in releasing results.” I hope applicants receive results on Friday! We shall see.
