Middle Island, N.Y.: Hands of a student are shown with pencil and test booklet during New York State math test on May 2, 2017. (Photo by John Paraskevas/Newsday RM via Getty Images)
Sacramento, California – Nearly two months after technical glitches marred the February California bar exam, the State Bar has triggered fresh controversy by revealing that some of the test’s multiple-choice questions were developed with the help of artificial intelligence.
In a statement released Monday, the State Bar announced it would ask the California Supreme Court to adjust scores for affected test takers — but stopped short of acknowledging widespread problems with the exam’s content. The admission that a subset of the 171 scored questions came from AI-assisted authorship has sparked outrage from legal educators and students alike.
“The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean at UC Irvine Law. “Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”
According to the State Bar, 100 questions were written by Kaplan Exam Services under an $8.25 million contract, 48 were recycled from a first-year law student exam, and 23 were developed with AI by ACS Ventures — the same company hired to validate the test’s integrity.
Critics have slammed what they see as a clear conflict of interest, noting that ACS Ventures both created and evaluated questions. “It’s a staggering admission,” said Katie Moran, a University of San Francisco law professor. “They paid the same company to assess and approve its own work.”
Bar officials insisted that all questions — including those generated using AI — were reviewed for legal accuracy, competence, and bias. Executive Director Leah Wilson said the questions “performed above the psychometric target of 0.80” when assessed for reliability.
But educators remain unconvinced. Basick and Moran flagged issues with Kaplan’s questions weeks before the exam, citing typos, missing facts, and confusing language. “The 50 practice questions released just weeks before the exam still contained numerous errors,” they wrote in a public comment.
The California Supreme Court, which oversees the State Bar, said it was unaware until this week that AI had been used in question development — a revelation that has raised further questions about transparency.
Meanwhile, the fallout continues. Several students have filed a federal lawsuit against Meazure Learning, the company that administered the glitch-prone exam. Lawmakers have called for an audit of the State Bar, and the Supreme Court has ordered the agency to return to fully in-person exams for July.
Still, the State Bar is pressing ahead with its controversial hybrid testing model — and refusing, for now, to abandon its use of AI-generated content.
