Senate committee hears emotional testimony on February bar exam failures, advances bill for state auditor review

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday advanced SB 47, author Senator Josh Umberg(committee chair on this bill), after hours of testimony from February 2025 bar-exam applicants, law school deans and State Bar leaders about widespread technical and administrative failures during the February bar exam.

The bill, authored by Senator Umberg, would require the California State Auditor to audit the February bar exam administration and related decision-making at the State Bar of California. Committee members said the audit is intended to identify systemic causes and recommend steps to prevent recurrence.

The committee heard first-hand accounts from four examinees who described repeated technical failures, proctoring interruptions and other problems that they said materially disrupted their testing. Andrea Lynch testified that proctors repeatedly took control of her mouse, interrupted her and that answers failed to save; her exam later crashed and "my exam had been submitted on my behalf prematurely before I'd even seen the final session." Amy Cassini (testimony spelled in transcript as Kasuni) described an exam platform that "crashed nonstop for 30 minutes" during a performance test and said the day-2 multiple-choice section included questions she called "absurd." Steven Zendejas told the committee the test interface repeatedly kicked him offline and that some multiple-choice items were "oddly worded," and noted the State Bar had not disclosed which version of an AI tool it used to draft some questions. Tanya Sahili said she had documented platform failures during a November experimental administration and warned the same system would not scale to the 4,300 applicants who sat the February administration.

Academic…