An influential Californian legislator puts pressure on the California state bar to abandon its new multiple choice questions after an examination of the February bar and return to traditional test format in July.
“Given the February bar disaster, I think that returning to the methods that have been used in the past 50 years – until we can adequately test what new methods can be used – is the appropriate path to follow,” said senator Thomas J. Umberg, president of the State Senate Judicial Committee, in Times.
Thousands of candidates for tests seeking to practice law in California generally take the two -day bar examination in July. Back to the national system by the national conference of bars examiners, which California has used since 1972, would be a major retirement for the besieged state bar. His new examination has been deployed this year as a cost reduction measure and “historic agreement” which would offer candidates the tests of remote tests.
Alex Chan, a lawyer who chairs the barriend’s examiner committee, who exercises monitoring of the California bar, told Times earlier this week that he was unlikely that the State Bar to the NCBE exams in July.
“We are not going back to the NCBE – at least in the short term,” said Chan.
The safety of the NCBE exams would not allow any form of distant tests, said Chan, and the recent surveys of the State Bar showed that almost half of the candidates at the California bar wished to keep the remote option.
Last year, the financially attached state bar made the decision to reduce costs by replacing the test issues developed by examining the multi-state bar of the national conference examiners, which does not allow remote tests. If the State Bar had developed his own questions, he thought he could save money by sparing the rental fees for massive examination rooms for all candidates.
The State Bar hired a seller, Meazure Learning, to administer the exam and announced a Five.25 million dollars five.25 million Authorize the Kaplan Examin Services test preparation company to create multiple, test and performance test questions.
But after the sloppy deployment of the new exam in February – when many candidates for tests complained of a litany technical problems, seeds and irregularities – The highest jurisdiction of the State, which oversees the state bar, ordered the agency to plan the administration of the July examination in the traditional format in person.
The Supreme Court has not yet ordered the state bar to return to the NCBE system, even if the test candidates have complained that some of the multiple questions in the new test included typing faults and questions with more than two correct answers and omitted important facts.
This week, the state bar raised the candidates and legal experts when he revealed that he had hired Acs Ventures, his independent state psychometrician who validates and scores exams to ensure that they are reliable, to develop a small subset of multiple choice questions using artificial intelligence.
“They have to go back to the multi-state bar this summer,” Katie Moran, an associate professor at the San Francisco University, told the School of Law. “They have just shown that they cannot do a fair test.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, accepted.
“The reality is that distant options, as indicated in February, work badly,” he said. “The bar exam is too important for them to experience as they did and continue to do.”
Umberg state senator, a former prosecutor, compared a non-avocado using artificial intelligence to write questions for an examination of the bar “to non-physicists designing questions with the help of AI to decide who is qualified to become a surgeon”.
As president of the Senate Judicial Committee, Umberg has a considerable influence on the State Bar. He recently pushed Bill 40 of the Senate, a new law which obliges the Senate to confirm the future appointments of the Executive Director and Advocate General of the State Bar. After the debacle of the February examination, Umberg filed a legislation to launch an independent examination of the examination by the auditor of the State of California, in order to discover what happened so “spectacularly false”.
This bill should be revised during a hearing of the Judicial Committee of the Senate on May 6, as well as the Senate Bill 253, the annual bill on the annual license fees of the State Bar, which gives leverage to push the bar to make improvements.
Umberg said the upcoming hearing will go beyond the administration of the February bar exam.
“We are going to examine the management of the bar,” he said. “We will examine what has happened since our last surveillance audience in terms of responsibility and transparency.”
Asked if he had confidence in the direction of the state bar. Umberg said: “My confidence is shaken.”
Umberg would not say if the executive director of the State Bar, Leah Wilson, should resign, but said that the question is “one of the questions we will examine here in the coming months”.
The State Bar announced this week that it would ask the Supreme Court to adjust the results of the tests for those who have passed its February bar exam.
For criticisms of the state bar, the problem is not only that he used AI to develop questions, but that he did so without the knowledge of the Supreme Court of California and the Committee of Bar Reviewers.
The state bar told Times that the decision to ensure that ACS Ventures develops questions with the help of AI programs “had been taken by the staff of the admissions office and not clearly communicated to the management of the State Bar.”
“This was ventilation, and structural changes were made to admissions to remedy it,” said the State Bar, noting that he has since created a new level -in -chief role on admissions reporting directly to the Executive Director and “a new team structure to strengthen responsibility and efficiency”.
At the same time, the State Bar has minimized the importance of hiring ACS activities to develop questions, noting the “general support for the company’s bar exam – whose CBE and the Council are aware – is covered by their existing contract”.
All multiple questions, including those “developed initially with the help of the AI,” said the State Bar, “were then examined by content validation panels composed of lawyers, and an expert in lawyers, within the framework of the development and finalization process.”
Whatever happens next, said Umberg, the state bar should take the time to prevent the debacle of the February bar exam from reproducing.
“Taking the bar examination is really a test that people are preparing for three years or more,” said Umberg, noting that two of his children had taken it in recent years. “The fact that test candidates, in essence, were guinea pigs for the February bar is absolutely unacceptable.”
“This is why,” said Umberg, “we are going to return to the old methodology here in July.”
California Daily Newspapers
