Three California Bar Exam Takers Were Scored on Others’ Work (1)

The California State Bar said Wednesday three February applicants were initially given grades for essays they didn’t write.

Their scores didn’t change when their exams were later matched with the answers they wrote. Two failed, and one passed, the State Bar said in an email to test takers.

But the Bar’s review of applicants’ scoring concerns did change outcomes for some: Four more people have passed after the Bar said it caught a failure to properly impute scores and a “clerical error.”

Andrew Scott Noseworthy is one of them. He’s spent months advocating for February exam takers and got the call while he was working on his motorcycle Wednesday, taking a break from drafting another email to the State Bar.

“My hands were covered in oil, so I couldn’t see who was calling,” he said. The voice on the other end said, “‘This is Leah Wilson from the State Bar.’ And I was like, oh my God, is this some sick prank call that would just put me over the edge?”

“She said, ‘Andrew, we were looking at your score, and you were one of the people who should have received an imputation for the performance test, and there was an oversight,’” Noseworthy said, recounting his conversation with Wilson—the Bar’s executive director who has said she’ll step down when her term ends in July.

“‘It turns out you did receive the passing score,’” she added, according to Noseworthy, “‘or you should have, at least.’”

Noseworthy lost his job at a medical malpractice firm last week when he was incorrectly informed he hadn’t passed the exam. The firm told him he could return when he got his license, he said.

Noseworthy said there’s “no bad blood” at work and he’ll reach back out, but he’s taking time off first to mentally and emotionally recover from the toll of the exam.

“It’s been such an intense experience,” he said, adding, “I don’t think I will lose my passion for the law, but I was very passionate, and this almost sucked the passion out of me, this experience, which is a really damaging thing for the public and for the profession.”

The Bar is having a third-party review all scoring and grading concerns “in recognition of both the need for greater transparency around and confidence in the scoring process, as well as the significant demands on staff who are necessarily focusing on planning for a successful July bar exam administration,” it said.

Four More Pass

The scoring switch-up is the latest twist in the saga of California’s brand-new exam that glitched and crashed widely on test day.

The exam was meant to save the bar $3.8 million annually but instead is expected to cost $5.6 million; it’s prompted state lawmakers to call for an audit and several lawsuits against the vendor providing the faulty test platform.

A chart-topping 55.9% of applicants passed the test in February, after the California Supreme Court approved a score boost despite news that a Bar contractor used ChatGPT to write some of the questions.

The four applicants who most recently passed the Bar all took the March 17 and 18 retake exam, which the Bar offered to those it said were so impacted by the platform crashing that their tests were “impossible to score.”

One retaker passed after their score for a missing answer was imputed by statistical analysis. Three passed after incorrectly getting “zeroes” on retake essays they did submit, because of “the numbering on two of the essays having been inadvertently switched.”

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.

“We understand how frustrating the past several months have been for many of you, and we apologize,” the Bar said.