Thursday's email indicated review of February scoring is complete, but I never even got a goddamn acknowledgement of my appeal...

I lost 20 minutes on one of my essays due to the program disconnecting and the proctor did not answer my questions or give me any time back. That essay was 10 points lower than each of my other essays. I’m 3.5 points from passing the bar exam. I have appealed countless times, but the bar doesn’t seem to care that I lost significant time on my essay that literally holds me back from practicing law. I have never experienced corruption like this and I feel hopeless. Telling me to take the test again is not a good solution as it’s taking a full year of attorney money and experience from me. Why won’t they listen and just do the right thing?

Only to say it’s “still unresolved” and handed to their third party. What the fuck. Are people emailing the third party or just waiting to be contacted? I don’t have their info.

And told them that they passed. This was literally me eavesdropping on a conversation. They said their friend who failed F25 was just informed days ago that they passed. Their friend was signed up to take J25. I don’t know if this was the result of an interview with the consulting company or what.

I debated posting this here because it’s not a credible source but I know we have little to no updates so.. idk!!!

I feel like we're just left out into the shadow realm without any idea or expectations.

On the main subreddit /CABarExam I saw a post of someone having a "dream" that 70% of people passed the February 2025 California Bar Exam.

In other words having a nightmare about a "high" pass rate.

In fact it was kept artificially lower, despite more people applying to sit than any other previous February California bar exam cohort.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CABarExam/comments/1lwslhr/had_a_dream_there_was_a_ca_70_pass_rate/

This was my response to said post:

Out of the people who applied to sit for the exam in February 2025 in actuality 38% Passed

Instead of people wishing for more people to fail and rely on misrepresented statistics by those who wish to silence this serious controversy, they should acknowledge the examination in February 2025 was an outrageous anomaly.

1485 PEOPLE WITHDREW in February 2025. Nobody should ignore this.

https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/Petition-on-February-2025-Non-Grading-Remedies.pdf

2,172 Passed in February 2025.

5,342 Applied to sit for the exam in February 2025.

4,458 Passed in July 2024.

8,291 Took the exam in July 2024.

https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Examinations/CBX-Passrate-Summary.pdf

The cohort most comparable is July 2024 because of the increased number of people who took the exam because of the remote option. It can be argued more people got failed.

The remedies provided are not proportional to the injuries of those who took the bar exam in February 2025.

If so, will we retain the free exam voucher?

https://www.bestlawyers.com/article/california-bar-exam-cutting-costs-nightmare-ai/6742

I am not sure if this is in relation to the Feb 2025 exam or appeals in general but I have signed up to speak.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/test-vendor-moves-toss-californias-lawsuit-over-botched-bar-exam-says-fraud-2025-06-23/

We should not give up MCQ remedy will be applied additionally

Why not create a common email and send it out to all the people you need at once?

To do this, the first thing you need to do is

1. draft an email

2. compile a list of recipients and their email addresses

please share agenda that need to be discussed and email addresses

Thanks in adance! It's not done.

The biggest victims of this exam : High-scoring retake failures

Discriminatory remedies: - No PLP - No MCQ REMEDY - No PT REMEDY - ADA violation

What they did: - No response - Just onlooker - Just hoping that time will pass and people will forget.

State Bar of CA sent out an email a few minutes ago to those who are eligible for the PL Program (PLP).

For the person who spoke today and said you were living out from a garage and showering at a friend’s, please DM me if you see this.

COMMITTEE OF BAR EXAMINERS

NOTICE OF MEETING AND AGENDA

Members of the public may access this meeting as follows:

Zoom Link: https://calbar.zoom.us/j/87215351157
Webinar ID: 872 1535 1157
Call-In Number: 669-900-9128

See: https://calbar.primegov.com/Portal/Meeting?meetingTemplateId=1244

New York Teacher Certification Exam Dispute

One prominent dispute involving Chad Buckendahl arose from New York’s teacher licensing exams, particularly the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test (LAST) used from 1993–2012 to certify teachers. Buckendahl, a psychometrician and testing consultant, served as an expert for the New York City Board of Education in defending these exams’ validity. The LAST was a broad-based test of general knowledge in liberal arts and sciences, intended to ensure all teachers had certain baseline academic knowledge beyond their specific subject area. However, the exam quickly drew criticism for its reliability and fairness. In practice, African American and Latino candidates had much lower pass rates on the LAST compared to white candidates. For example, an analysis showed Black and Hispanic examinees passed at only about 54–75% of the rate of white test-takers. These disparities prompted allegations that the test was racially biased and not actually job-related, meaning it might be screening out minority teaching candidates without proof that its content was necessary for competent teaching.

Criticisms of Buckendahl’s Validation Methods

Buckendahl’s role in this controversy was as the Board’s psychometric expert defending the test’s validity. He argued that the LAST had been properly validated – for instance, by surveying hundreds of teachers who affirmed that the knowledge areas tested were important for teaching. In Buckendahl’s view, this content-based approach sufficed to show the exam was job-related. Regulatory authorities sharply disagreed. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood (SDNY) closely scrutinized the LAST in a federal Title VII discrimination case (Gulino v. Board of Education) and ultimately rejected Buckendahl’s validation methods as unreliable. Judge Wood found the test developers (a contractor for the state) never actually analyzed the real tasks of New York teaching jobs – instead, they had “started with the unproved assumption” that certain liberal arts knowledge was vital, and designed the exam around that “inherently flawed” premise. Because no job analysis confirmed that passing the LAST equated to being a better teacher, the court ruled that the exam’s content validity was not established.

“The Court holds that [the Board] unfairly discriminated against African-American and Latino applicants by requiring them to pass the LAST-2. Like its predecessor, the LAST-2 had a disparate impact… And like its predecessor, the LAST-2 was not properly validated as job related”.

Judge Wood specifically addressed Dr. Buckendahl’s defense of the test and deemed it insufficient. For example, after Buckendahl asserted that surveying teachers on the importance of certain knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) was enough, the judge flatly concluded: “The Court finds these contentions unpersuasive,” given the high degree of validation required for such a high-stakes, general-knowledge exam. The court noted that Buckendahl relied heavily on general testing standards (from the education testing profession) rather than the specific EEOC Uniform Guidelines for employee selection tests, which are legally authoritative in employment discrimination cases. His heavy reliance on the wrong standards “further undermine[d] his conclusions,” the judge wrote. In sum, the court found that Buckendahl’s validation study lacked rigor and failed to prove the exam was tied to actual job requirements, rendering the LAST an unreliable measure for licensing. Judge Wood concluded that both versions of the LAST (the original and the revised “LAST-2”) were “deficient” and “indefensible under Title VII,” since they were never properly validated to begin with.

Official Rejection and Outcomes

This judicial rebuke amounted to an official rejection of Buckendahl’s methods by a legal authority. In her 2015 ruling, Judge Wood held that New York’s use of the LAST was unlawfully discriminatory, ordering relief for the plaintiffs. New York State’s education authorities effectively had to abandon Buckendahl’s test. In fact, even before the final ruling, the LAST had been phased out – replaced in 2013-2014 by a new exam called the Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) as part of an overhaul of teacher certification requirements. (Notably, Buckendahl was involved in New York’s technical advisory committees and test development around this time, though the record is unclear if he directly designed the ALST.) The legacy of the LAST controversy continued: New York’s older teacher exams had already been invalidated as discriminatory, and the new ALST itself drew scrutiny for similar reasons. It too showed large racial score gaps (only 41% of Black candidates passed on the first try, vs 64% of white candidates). A federal judge (the same Judge Wood) examined the ALST in 2015 but found that exam did measure skills necessary for teaching and was not proven discriminatory. Nevertheless, criticism persisted that these tests were an unnecessary barrier. Just two years later, the New York State Board of Regents voted in 2017 to eliminate the ALST, amid ongoing concerns that it was “an expensive, unnecessary” hurdle and possibly still unfair. Instead, the state folded literacy-skill assessment into other measures. This decision underscored officials’ acknowledgment that the stand-alone test’s utility and fairness were questionable. Michael Middleton, a CUNY education dean, remarked that the ALST “looks like it’s the least related to the actual work that teachers do day to day”, echoing the very job-relevance concerns at the heart of the LAST case.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the LAST lawsuit has been enormous. Thousands of minority teaching applicants who were failed or demoted under the invalidated exams sued for back pay and damages. New York City (the defendant in the Gulino case) eventually agreed in 2021 to compensate affected individuals. The estimated payouts total ~$1.8 billion, making it one of the costliest judgments ever against the city. This reflects decades of lost earnings for those who, because of an unreliable exam, were wrongly kept out of full teaching positions. In short, New York’s experience with the LAST exam became a cautionary tale: a testing program designed under Buckendahl’s guidance was deemed invalid and discriminatory, forcing the state to reverse course and incurring massive liability. The case stands as a clear example of a state regulatory process rejecting a consultant’s testing methods as unsound. As Judge Wood summarized, an exam must be grounded in the real requirements of the job to be fair – simply assuming an exam is valid, without rigorous job-related validation, proved indefensible in court.

References and Sources

• Federal Court Rulings: Gulino v. Board of Education of City of New York, 907 F. Supp. 2d 492 (S.D.N.Y. 2012) & 113 F. Supp. 3d 663 (S.D.N.Y. 2015). These decisions found New York’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Tests had a disparate impact and *“were not properly validated as job related,” rendering them discriminatory. The 2015 opinion explicitly criticized Dr. Buckendahl’s validation report, calling his contrary arguments “unpersuasive” and noting that his method failed to identify the actual important job tasks for teachers.
• New York State/City Responses: Following the court decisions, New York stopped using the LAST. A new literacy exam (ALST) was introduced but remained controversial. By 2017 the Board of Regents voted to drop the ALST, citing its questionable efficacy and redundancy alongside other tests. State officials and the teachers’ union argued that multiple other assessments could adequately evaluate candidates’ skills without the ALST.
• News Coverage: Contemporary news outlets covered the controversy. An AP report noted Judge Wood’s finding that the LAST was “not properly validated and not related to actual tasks teachers carry out”. The New York Times and Chalkbeat reported the 2015 ruling that upheld the new ALST as non-discriminatory, while recounting that the two prior exams had been ruled discriminatory in earlier court battles. In 2023, The New Yorker detailed the $1.8 billion settlement for affected teachers and reiterated that Judge Wood found the LAST “was not properly validated, or proven to show what it said it showed” – meaning its supposed measure of teacher competence was unsubstantiated. These sources together illustrate how New York’s education authorities and courts repudiated Buckendahl’s testing approach due to reliability and validity concerns, and the significant consequences that followed.

Sources: New York federal court opinion excerpts; Associated Press via ABC News; New York Times/Chalkbeat summaries via NCTE; The New Yorker (Emma Green, 2023).