California Bar discloses AI was used to develop some questions in problem-plagued February exam
LOS ANGELES The State Bar of California has disclosed that specific multiple-choice questions in a problem-plagued bar exam were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence The legal licensing body revealed in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam Related Articles Why first-gen students struggles don t end on graduation day Nationwide hacking of students private photos reaches CSU East Bay How do high schoolers in your area really fare after graduation A new California tool lets you know SJSU s Blaire Fleming sheds light on her tumultuous senior season as a trans athlete Harvard sues Trump administration to stop the freeze of more than billion in grants The debacle that was the February bar exam is worse than we imagined Mary Basick assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California Irvine Law School explained the Los Angeles Times I m almost speechless Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable In February the new exam led to complaints after a large number of test-takers were unable to complete their bar exams The online testing platforms repeatedly crashed before particular applicants even started Others struggled to finish and save essays experienced screen lags and error messages and could not copy and paste text the Times released earlier According to a latest presentation by the State Bar of the scored multiple-choice questions were made by Kaplan and were drawn from a first-year law students exam A smaller subset of scored questions were made by ACS Ventures the State Bar s psychometrician and developed with artificial intelligence We have confidence in the validity of the multiple-choice questions to accurately and fairly assess the legal competence of test-takers Leah Wilson the State Bar s executive director communicated the newspaper in a comment Katie Moran an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation narrated the newspaper It s a staggering admission The State Bar has admitted they employed a company to have a non-lawyer use AI to draft questions that were given on the actual bar exam she explained They then paid that same company to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam including the questions the company authored Andrew Perlman dean of Suffolk University Law School and an advisory council member of the American Bar Association Task Force on the Law and Artificial Intelligence mentioned he had not heard of AI being used to develop bar exam questions or standards being put in place governing such uses But he announced he was not surprised given the rapid increase of AI mechanism Perlman revealed AI can be useful for growing questions for assessment but a critical guard rail is making sure that everything that comes from an AI tool is vetted meticulously by experts in the subject matter He expects its use to continue to grow Although there might be community skepticism of the emerging machinery in the legal profession at this time we will be worried in the future about the competence of lawyers who don t use these tools Perlman predicted
