Nearly half of California’s bar exam test-takers watched their laptops freeze mid-test. Some saw error messages instead of questions. A few encountered exam questions that shouldn’t have been graded at all. And according to a scathing state audit released this week, every single one of these failures was preventable.
The February 2025 California Bar Exam was supposed to be an upgrade—a move toward flexibility, lower costs, and a California-specific test replacing the old national standard. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about what happens when you compress years of planning into a compressed timeline and then fail to adequately test the result.
The numbers tell the story. The California Supreme Court greenlit the new exam format in late October 2024. The State Bar finalized its agreement with testing vendor Meazure Learning a month later. Less than three months after that, thousands of aspiring attorneys sat for the exam. The State Auditor’s office found that the State Bar failed to adequately test the new system before launch and didn’t provide sufficient oversight of its vendors. The result? Chaos. Nearly 1,350 test-takers reported computer freezes or crashes. Roughly 1,200 got error messages. And 29 of the 200 multiple-choice questions were so flawed they had to be removed from scoring entirely.
The ripple effects destroyed the cost-saving promise. The February exam cost at least $5.1 million to administer. Refunds and fee waivers added another $4 million in losses. So much for cutting costs. The State Bar also had to adjust scoring after the fact—the auditor estimates the pass rate jumped from about 36% to approximately 65% following those adjustments. Thousands of test-takers faced wildly different conditions: some crashed, some didn’t. Some saw bad questions that never should have been graded. Some didn’t. Stephen Zendejas, who took the exam, called the experience“traumatizing.”He put it bluntly:“When you get these variables that haven’t been given to other test takers before, that’s really, really difficult.”
The State Bar has accepted all six of the State Auditor’s recommendations and says it’s already reshuffling leadership, strengthening vendor oversight, and building new frameworks for future exams. Chris Micheli, a legislative advocate and adjunct professor at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, pointed to what many will see as the core failure:“What stood out to me most is the fact that there was probably inadequate oversight over the people contracted to develop the bar questions. Perhaps you start at a much earlier time period.”
That’s the kind of hindsight that costs millions and derails careers. California’s bar exam is one of the toughest licensing exams in the country. Test-takers spend months preparing, pay hundreds in fees, and stake their entire professional futures on a single day. When that day goes wrong because of preventable administrative failures, it’s not just a glitch—it’s a betrayal of trust. The State Bar is making promises about reform. Now comes the hard part: actually delivering it.
About the Author
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
