Opinion: Botched exam for new lawyers is California bureaucrats’ latest tech failure

Seal of the State Bar of California File photo This column was originally published by CalMatters Sign up for their newsletters Is there something in California s water that induces the state s bureaucrats to make boneheaded errors of judgment It would seem so given the sorry history of monumental screwups Multiple of the state executive s wrongheaded actions involve abortive efforts to use advanced equipment The poster child for those high-tech basket cases has been Financial Information System for California dubbed FI Cal which was supposed to be a comprehensive financial management system but has struggled for decades to become reliably functional Its constant delays and cost overruns revealed that despite California s global role in innovation innovation the state bureaucracy has been chronically unable to implement systems that work as promised Another tech fiasco occurred in the court system The state Judicial Council and the Administrative Office of the Courts launched a project in that was supposed to be a centralized event management system It was so deficient that after a decade of wheel-spinning costing more than a half-billion dollars the project was abandoned The majority of spectacular example of mismanagement is the state s Employment Maturation Department s attempt to distribute billions of dollars in unemployment insurance benefits to those who lost jobs during the COVID- pandemic Not only did the EDD fail to deliver payments to a large number of workers who needed them in a timely manner but it sent tens of billions of dollars in payments to fraudsters who gamed the system California doesn t need another entrant on its list of managerial failures but it has one in what happened when the State Bar changed its test of aspiring lawyers The licensing agency was feeling a financial pinch and formulated its own test to save money When the exam was administered in February it was a tragedy The online testing platforms repeatedly crashed before certain applicants even started the Los Angeles Times shared Others struggled to finish and save essays experienced screen lags and error messages and could not copy and paste text from test questions into the exam s response field a function agents had stated would be doable Ever since State Bar leaders exam takers legislators and state Supreme Court justices have been arguing over what should be done with the obviously flawed results especially after it was revealed that the agency used artificial intelligence to formulate exam questions without making that known Last week the Supreme Court lowered the passing total for the February exam and ordered the State Bar to dump its new system and return to the traditional test format On Monday the State Bar released that with the lower passing scores of February exam takers passed as well as of those who took a one-day exam meaning the state has new lawyers Simultaneously the State Bar disclosed it was suing Measure Learning the vendor that administered the botched February exam for fraud The mishap also claimed the State Bar s executive director Leah T Wilson Wilson noted she would step down in July when her annual contract is set to expire Despite our best intentions the experiences of applicants for the February Bar Exam solely were unacceptable and I fully recognize the frustration and stress this experience caused Wilson declared While there are no words to assuage those emotions I do sincerely apologize Wilson s apologetic report is a refreshing departure from the evasion of accountability that traditionally accompanies official debacles That s progress of a sort but not making bad decisions would be preferable CalMatters is a community interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California s state Capitol works and why it matters