Opinion: California Dreamin’ of a Bar Exam That Works
In the grand, gilded state of California, where the sun shines on ambition and the law is a sacred circus, a spectacle unfolded in February 2025 that would make even the most stoic jurist weep with laughter—or despair. The California Bar Exam, that hallowed rite of passage for would-be attorneys, descended into a farce of technical tomfoolery and administrative absurdity, leaving graduates of Santa Clara University School of Law clutching their diplomas like life rafts in a sea of glitchy software and indifferent proctors.
As Dean Michael J. Kaufman put it with the weary eloquence of a man watching his house burn down, the exam was a “fiasco through the entire process,” a sentiment echoed in a biting alumni call-to-action posted on February 28, 2025, by the law school’s news page.
Picture this: thousands of eager legal eaglets, their minds sharpened by years of torts and contracts, sat down to prove their mettle, only to be thwarted not by tricky hypotheticals but by the digital equivalent of a drunk stenographer. The State Bar, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy like a bankrupt vaudeville troupe, had outsourced its sacred duty to Meazure Learning/ProctorU, a company stepping into the spotlight for its first big California Bar Exam performance. The result? Lagging screens, proctors who might as well have been napping, and exam questions—penned by Kaplan, no less—that raised eyebrows for their quality. Oh, and the price tag? A cool grand-plus, because nothing says “justice” like gouging the dreams of the young and broke.
The Bar’s official mea culpa came mid-exam, a Tuesday night announcement that some poor souls would need to redo parts of the test due to “technical difficulties.” Imagine the scene: bleary-eyed examinees, already battered by hours of legal labyrinths, told to pencil in a redo like it’s a dentist appointment. Meanwhile, registration for the July exam, usually open by March 1, remains in limbo—an apt metaphor for the whole enterprise. The Bar’s Board of Trustees, wringing their hands, dangled refunds and a July mulligan, but Santa Clara’s Professor Devin Kinyon, with the earnestness of a man rallying the cavalry, urged alumni to speak out: “The Santa Clara Law community always shows up for our students. We need their voices on this issue.”
Dean Kaufman, bless his soul, has appealed to the California Supreme Court, that lofty pantheon of judicial wisdom, to swoop in and save the day. But why stop there? If the Bar can’t manage a simple exam without turning it into a technological trainwreck, what hope is there for their Law Reader program—that quaint, Dickensian relic where aspiring lawyers study under mentors instead of in classrooms? If they can’t keep a Zoom call running, how can they oversee a mentorship system that’s supposed to churn out competent counsel? Maybe it’s time to ditch the whole charade and embrace diploma privilege—let the schools vouch for their own, and spare us the circus of proctors who can’t find the mute button.
The alumni call-to-action, a rallying cry penned with the urgency of a wartime telegram, begs Santa Clara Law alumni who are admitted to practice in California to storm the Bar’s March 5 meeting or fire off emails to [email protected], demanding fairness for the February victims and a July exam that doesn’t repeat the madness. “Generously evaluate” the test-takers, they plead, and don’t just shrug and offer a free retry—lost time and sanity don’t come with a coupon. Return to in-person exams, they suggest, until someone invents a remote system that doesn’t crash harder than a first-year’s dreams after a Civ Pro final.
So here we are, in the Golden State’s latest comedy of errors, where the Bar’s incompetence is the punchline and the students are the punch-drunk audience. As Kaufman told Reuters, it’s “unconscionable” to pile this mess atop an already grueling ordeal. Maybe it’s time to hand out law licenses with diplomas and call it a day. After all, if the Bar can’t examine, why should we trust them to gatekeep?
