People pay to take this exam. Someone decided to pocket some of that money for their org and have an AI org do some of it instead of qualified professionals. They didn't bother to check the output. It came out poorly and now they have to eat the cost of going back and fixing it. The students and proctors are not compensated for the added time and stress, but paid the same for an overall worse experience. It's a microcosm of everything wrong with the way AI is being used.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
126 points (98.5% liked)
News
28929 readers
6292 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
They thought they didnt need lawers or programmers!
The CA Bar used a different company to administer the test this year. It was a you total mess.
A friend has proctored the exam multiple times and said they felt terrible for all the test takers.
The Bar has already said they will go back to the old test process.
Man, lawyers just DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LIMITATIONS OF LLMs.
It seems like a failure of the LLM creators for marketing it the way they do
That's part of the problem here. Lawyers didn't make up the questions on the exam.
"Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”
I'm perfectly fine with non-lawyers, and/or LLMs writing the questions. What was stupid was that it wasn't independently validated and proofread by a third party.
“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 said. “They then paid that same company to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam, including the questions the company authored.”
It's a bar exam. One of the most important tests these people will take in their entire career, and they half assed the implementation.
Is the most important test the test takers will take. For the test givers, it was Tuesday.
"Although there might be public skepticism of the emerging technology 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."
It's pretty clear from this shitshow they should be worried about lawyers who are using these tools.
OR MORE specifically the non-lawyers writing bar exam questions with AI.
Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, told 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 said. “They then paid that same company to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam, including the questions the company authored.”
Non lawyers writing questions for a competency exam for lawyers with zero oversight by anyone in the profession?
As a lawyer—this is bullshit.
Considering the now multiple cases of LLMs citing non-existent case law, I thought we already were. Seems like using the "there are only two R's in strawberry" machine to do your job would potentially be grounds for losing your professional license.
AI will never, ever make anyone better at their job. It might in some cases help them to be faster.
If competency is the concern, AI has no role here.
And there's the crux of the issue. Capitalism doesn't give a fuck if LLMs are right. It only cares if it raises its stock option payouts.
That's extremely worrisome for me, as well. It's bad enough AI was used already to argue cases badly, are lawyers now feeling entitled to their exorbitant fees without even the abuse of paralegals and researchers?
I'm in law school right now. AI is pretty helpful for researching briefs. You can ask it super specific legal questions and get answers with citations. But what you can't do is just copy and paste shit and not check the citations to make sure they're real.
The idea that they'd use AI to write the test questions and not independent verify them is ridiculous.