It has now come to light that California’s State Bar blocked a group of legal academics from participating in a previously scheduled review of content on the troubled February 2025 California Bar Exam, raising new questions about the material tested on the licensing exam.
About a dozen law school deans and professors had agreed in January 2025, at the Bar’s invitation, to look over the exam’s multiple-choice questions, essay topics and performance test material as part of a process, known as standard setting. The review, according to an email sent to invitees, would help shape scoring of the licensing exam.

Bar officials confirmed plans for the reviewers to travel to the agency’s office in Los Angeles two times, once in March and again in April, to see the questions administered to applicants on the February 26 and 27 exam.

But in the days that immediately followed the exam, which was marked by widespread technical problems that rendered some examinees unable to finish or even start the test, Bar officials called the reviewers and rescinded all of their invitations. The reason was not made clear.
Mary Basick, Assistant Dean for Academic Skills at UC Irvine School of Law, was one of the uninvited reviewers. She said a Bar employee told her the agency’s General Counsel, Ellin Davtyan, had determined that anyone who had worked in recent months with material from the National Council of Bar Examiners, or NCBE, had a conflict of interest and could not see the bar exam content.

Other scheduled reviewers said they, too, had received similar calls canceling their trips to Los Angeles.

But Basick said she does not understand why her familiarity with NCBE material made her ineligible to review the newly formed California Bar Exam questions, especially since after the exam was administered, there would be no opportunity to revise them. Reviewers were already sent non-disclosure agreements barring them from disclosing test content.

“I do not have confidence in the review process because the Bar has removed so many people with expertise in this area,” she said.
State Bar spokesperson Rick Coca said the agency could not address “individual cases” of review invitations being rescinded.
“The State Bar developed criteria for participation to address potential legal concerns, including intellectual property and conflicts of interest,” he said. “As a result, some individuals who were initially invited or interested in being on the review panels, could not participate.”
The original invitees had received emails from the Bar’s Admissions Office in January, identifying them as “uniquely qualified to serve” as reviewers “given your experience at your law school.”

Coca said the agency would not disclose the identities of who was ultimately chosen to review the test, citing “potential privacy and exam security concerns.”

One of the disinvited reviewers who saw the names of 10 people accepted by the bar to review the test said three hold positions at California-accredited or unaccredited law schools and seven are practicing attorneys. At least two of those seven have expertise in areas not tested by the exam, the source said. None of the 10 work at American Bar Association-approved schools.

Events surrounding the expert review of the February Bar Exam shine a light on an aspect of the test—the validity and quality of the questions—that has been overshadowed by the administration’s many technical problems. Some examinees have criticized the multiple-choice questions for appearing to omit vital facts or for providing two potentially correct answers.

The test questions themselves, as well as the process for writing them and reviewing them, remain shrouded in secrecy. But concerns were raised fewer than three weeks before February’s exam when the bar released a revised, red-lined student study guide for the test that recast and clarified some questions and appeared to redraft one completely because the original answer was wrong.

At the time, Bar Executive Director Leah Wison released a statement acknowledging that “the study guide was updated to include content maps and the approximate proportion of questions drawn from each subject, and to correct a couple of questions; in addition, minor grammatical corrections were made. As the content maps and subject matter weights show, we continue to keep our commitment to not materially changing what is needed to study for the February Bar Exam.”

You can read more about this situation here.

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