California Bar Grading Screw-Up Resulted In Several False Failures

Some things happen with such regularity that you can set a clock to them: roosters crowing at dawn, Kant’s ghost strolling through Königsberg in the afternoon, and new news of the California Bar screwing up the bar exam. As rough as it is to read about the Cali Bar’s mishaps, the real victims are the aspiring attorneys who had to sit through the damned thing. Crappy software and AI-generated questions were bad enough, but takers of the February exam also have to be on the lookout for emails telling them that they were falsely failed despite having passing grades. Bloomberg Law has coverage:

Four more people have passed after the Bar said it caught a failure to properly impute scores and a “clerical error.”
…
The Bar said it’s also reviewing some examinees’ Performance Test sections to ensure they are graded based on all the content in the “notes” section, rather than just the “response” window.

It didn’t specify how many applicants would be swept into this review, but noted examinees likely to pass with a higher PT score would be prioritized.

Maybe the real alternative to provisional licensing was to score every applicant’s test correctly the first time. As messy as this outcome was, the silver lining is that the outcome came out in the favor of the people the Bar had to contact with upgraded grades. What would happen if some of the test takers got false passes? Do you make the call knowing that they’ll likely lose whatever job they have at the moment, or do you show a little grace and let them fail upward? Hopefully they won’t have to make that call for the next round of tests.

Three California Bar Exam Takers Were Scored on Others’ Work (1) [Bloomberg Law]

Earlier: The California Bar Was So Bad That The Exam Vendor Is Getting Sued Over It

California Bar Reveals It Used AI For Exam Questions, Because Of Course It Did

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

The post California Bar Grading Screw-Up Resulted In Several False Failures appeared first on Above the Law.