California’s Supreme Court on Thursday evening rewrote plans for the state’s fall bar exam, canceling the in-person test set for September, setting a two-day online test in October and authorizing a provisional licensing plan that will allow law school graduates to temporarily practice law without passing the test.
Additionally, the court ordered that the score needed to pass the test—a figure known as the cut score—be permanently reduced from 145 to 139. The previous cut score was the second highest in the nation and regularly resulted in thousands of law school graduates failing a test that they would have passed under other states’ scoring rules.
