The California Bar Association stands out from the new exams — a cash-strapped agency’s move to save money — could end up incurring an additional $5.6 million.

Leah T. Wilson, executive director of the State Bar Association, told state lawmakers at a Senate judicial hearing that the agency is expected to pay about $3 million to offer free exams to test, and conducted $2 million in July to book a live test location and returned it to its traditional multiple choice questions test in July.

Wilson announced last week that she would resign at the end of this summer, revealing the fees at a 90-minute hearing convened by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Thomas J. Umberg (D-Orange) to find out what "very wonderful mistakes" happened.

The chaos that followed February followed by thousands of recipients trying to practice law in California to take new exams. Some people reported that they were unable to log in to the test because the online testing platform repeatedly crashed. Many experienced screen lags and error messages, struggle to complete and save papers, and complain about multiple choice issues that are incorrectly worded and contain typos.

"The question is, how did we come to this place?" Umbberg said at the beginning of the hearing. “How do we make sure we never come back to this place again?”

Last year, the state bar association was on the verge of a financial crisis when it announced plans for a new bar exam: its 2024 budget forecasts a deficit of $3.8 million in its admissions fund, which involves fees and fees related to managing bar exams. The fund warns that the fund faces bankruptcy in 2026.

The institution plans to abandon the traditional national bar exam, which requires taking testers and developing its own exams for remote exams. The State Bar Association facilitated the program as a “historic agreement”, which saved up to $3.8 million a year.

It is unclear how much money can be paid next year if the national bar retryes its own exam. Its fees are likely to be transferred as it litigated against Meazure Learning against vendors tested in February.

But the cost of the National Bar Association is not just financial. After the test collapse, the institution faces the embarrassment of resuming traditional face-to-face exams in July and has conducted a more scrutiny.

The Senate committee approved the February test recipient, the dean of the law school and the leader of the state law firm, and the Senate committee approved the California auditor's independent review of the exam.

Tester Andrea Lynch told lawmakers that she encountered constant interference during exams with inspectors, technical failures and computer crashes. At the end, as she was about to start the last part of the exam, a message popped up telling her that her exam had been submitted even before she could not see the problem.

"This is not a technical failure," Lynch told lawmakers. "It is a systematic failure, a breakdown of integrity, accessibility and equity in one of the most important professional milestones in the legal world. I urge the committee to consider what it means when a test aimed at maintaining judicial justice fails to deliver it to its applicants."

State Bar has filed civil complain Opposes Meazure Learning in the Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing suppliers of fraud, negligent statements and breach of contracts, claiming that distant and in-person exams can be conducted in a two-day window.

But critics of the state bar association believe that institutional leaders are responsible for not spending enough time developing new tests.

Jessica Berg, dean of the UC Davis School of Law, told lawmakers that the state bar association is eager to launch a bar exam throughout the process and lacks transparency throughout the process, causing financial and emotional harm to the testers and the financial and reputation of the state bar association and California.

"The problems we see in the bar exam are absolutely foreseeable, and they rely on the two parts that happen here - the substantive questions of the exam and the problems of the exam management," Berger said.

The hearing explored the question of multiple choice questions for the exam.

Two weeks ago, the State Bar Association revealed that its independent psychologist (measures the reliability of the exam and recommends scoring adjustments, but is not lawyers) used artificial intelligence to draft a subset of 29 multiple choice questions.

Under Umberg's inquiry, Wilson, executive director of the State Bar Association, admitted that "no attorneys assisted in the initial drafting." She said it was not until after the exam that she discovered that the chat GPT had drafted some questions.

Wilson also admitted that state bars did not copy editing test questions before the exam.

When asked about some multi-choice questions, Wilson said after the exam: "When I saw it on reddit."

Senator Umberg then raised a new concern: the fairness of test scores.

The state bar association announced Monday that the passing rate for February's exams was 55.9%, the highest spring pass rate since 1965. In February last year, the pass rate dropped significantly to 33.9%.

"I don't think anyone here is interested in going back and revisiting those who pass the bar, but what it tells me is that there are problems with the ratings," Umbberg said.

"How do you consider the huge difference between what happened in February between the pass rate of bars in February and what happened in history?" he asked.

Alex Chan, an attorney who chairs the State Bar Association’s Law Committee, said that despite the problems with the bar exam, the grading process remains strict and consistent with the previous administration. He attributed high pass scores to the California Supreme Court approval of the committee’s petition to reduce the original pass scores of the general lawyer examiner, down to 534 points or higher on papers, performance tests and multiple choice questions.

"The rating adjustments are not lenient in any way," Chan said. "They are designed to be fair and measure based on the circumstances and unprecedented technical failures."

Wilson also noted that the average original score of the tester in February 2025 in the written portion of the bar exam was higher than that of accomplices in 2024 or 2023. "This is without any psychological adjustment," she said. "So these 2025 testers performed better."

“So this bias is because they are smarter,” Umbberg said. “If the score has not decreased, what would it be?”

Donna S. Hershkowitz, the head of admissions at the State Bar Association, said that if the minimum original pass score is not lowered, the overall pass rate would be 46.9%, which is still higher than normal.

“I will be curious about what happened next year with the old format,” Umbberg said. “Anyway – assure those who passed away again – we won’t go back.”