The California Supreme Court has ordered the State Bar to stop writing its own bar exam and adopt the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam. Brian Kabateck and Shant Karnikian walk through how the state got here on the latest episode of Kabateck & Karnikian Off the Record, the firm’s podcast on the Daily Journal Network.
Kabateck traces a decade of trouble. Equity objections to the exam between 2016 and 2019, pass rates for first-time takers slipping into the 30% range, platform failures when COVID pushed the test remote, and a move away from the standardized multistate exam by 2023. It came apart in February 2025, when roughly 20% of takers reported performance problems and 29 questions were pulled from scoring. A state audit ordered by Sen. Tom Umberg found the Bar had proceeded despite knowing about crashes in earlier testing. Then came the disclosure that AI had drafted some of the questions.
Brian and Shant sort out which students sit for which exam during the transition and flag what is still unsettled, including a California-specific portion that no one has yet defined. They close on the question underneath the order: the February failure was an administration problem more than a drafting one, and the State Bar still administers the exam.
New episodes of Kabateck & Karnikian Off the Record are available Fridays on the Daily Journal Network’s YouTube channel.