Buy One Get One Free Cal Bar Exams!
With purchase a catastrophic exam of equal or lesser value. The post Buy One Get One Free Cal Bar Exams! appeared first on Above the Law.
The February administration of the California bar exam is so broken that they’re offering a free July test to everyone who fails. This comes after they already offered refunds to everyone struggling with the catastrophic launch of the new exam structure that takes the test outside the NCBE monopoly and uses Kaplan prepared questions for a test administered by Meazure Learning.
Despite the trouble they’ve faced, California’s effort to reinvent the bar exam was born out of necessity. The existing procedure — beholden to NCBE rules requiring the administrators to rent out pricey in-person venues — drove the licensing organ into the red and without a drastic change, the exam would continue hurtling toward bankruptcy. But a reform that probably needed a year or two to implement effectively received a matter of months and… here we are. Venues missing, practice tests not working, and communication vague at best.
So now we’re at the BOGO stage:
Specifically, the Board approved $3.1 million in the budget to support fee waivers for the July 2025 bar exam to eligible February 2025 bar exam takers and authorized staff to develop the eligibility framework, with general parameters being those who withdrew from or fail the February 2025 bar exam, after good faith efforts.
Recall that this whole thing is supposed to be about SAVING money, not losing it.
And someday it will be. I continue to be the Cal bar optimist who believes this will ultimately make for a better licensing exam (putting aside whether or not the bar exam is a good idea in the first place). But for now, it’s going to drag the examiners down a bit longer as they try to work out the kinks.
Earlier: California Bar Exam Disaster Reaches Its ‘Offer Everyone A Refund’ Stage
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Buy One Get One Free Cal Bar Exams! appeared first on Above the Law.
