California doesn’t need another entrant on its list of managerial failures, but it has one in what happened when the State Bar changed its test of aspiring lawyers.
The licensing agency was feeling a financial pinch and formulated its own test to save money. When the exam was administered in February,
it was a disaster.
“The online testing platforms repeatedly crashed before some applicants even started,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Others struggled to finish and save essays, experienced screen lags and error messages and could not copy and paste text from test questions into the exam’s response field — a function officials had stated would be possible.”
Ever since, State Bar officials, exam takers, legislators and state Supreme Court justices have been
arguing over what should be done with the obviously flawed results, especially after it was revealed that
the agency used artificial intelligence to formulate exam questions — without making that known.
