You go to law school. You take a bar review course. You study your butt off. You lie in bed awake with the fear of failure. You study some more. And then comes the day of the California bar exam and…
“I’ve never had this much despair and hopelessness,” said exam taker David Drelinger, a 2023 graduate of the California-accredited Lincoln Law School in Sacramento. He said he tried to start the exam more than 30 times, with the testing platform crashing each time a proctor logged on to his computer.
Drelinger said he switched internet connections and laptops three times during the day, to no avail. By Tuesday night, he was unsure whether he would be able to take the test at all.
“I’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars” into becoming a lawyer, Drelinger said. “It’s supposed to pay off, eventually. It feels so far out of reach right now. I don’t know if I can do this to myself again.”
Years ago, when others were obsessed over Reinventing The Future Of Law, I half-jokingly registered my preference for the yPad over the iPad. But what happened to bar exam takers was not merely inexcusable. It was incomprehensible. How in the world did they decide to use a platform without making absolutely sure it would work beforehand?
California Bar takers who sounded alarms for weeks leading up to the launch of the brand-new licensing exam said their fears were confirmed Tuesday when many reported severe technical issues on the first day of the February test.
Four examinees told Bloomberg Law that they experienced a litany of troubles: Online testing windows crashed. Essays failed to save. Examinees couldn’t copy and paste any text in the exam, despite being told as recently as Sunday they would have the function. The clock kept running while IT workers toyed with glitching computer screens.
Reddit posts on the r/CABarExam thread echo the same complaints. Test takers say the botched rollout of the new California Bar Exam has put their legal jobs at risk, cost them thousands of dollars in lost wages and exam-related expenses, and harmed their physical and mental health.
Why you might wonder, was it deemed necessary by the California State Bar to make a change at all? It’s California, of course.
The new exam was promoted by the State Bar of California as a cost-cutting measure that would offer test takers the choice of remote testing. But the deans of many of California’s top law schools had flagged concerns to the State Bar and California Supreme Court for months in the run up to the exams.
“It is stunning incompetence from an entity that exists to measure competence,” Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Times. “There’s no way to describe it other than than outrageous and inexcusable.” …
Last year, as the State Bar of California faced a $22.2-million deficit, it decided to replace the test questions developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ Multistate Bar Examination, which does not allow remote testing. It announced a new $8.25-million five-year deal authorizing test prep company Kaplan Exam Services to create multiple-choice, essays and performance test questions.
The new exam, it projected, would save the bar up to $3.8 million a year.
Unlike many law students and new lawyers who contend that the bar exam is a pointless hurdle to admission that bears little relationship to the practice of law and serves largely to suck up time, money and keep a lid on the number of new member of the guild, I believe that the bar exam serves a necessary purpose. As exams go, it’s not nearly as hard as many complain. Given that lawyers are admitted to the bar as generalists, they should have a working knowledge of the various basic areas of law even if they don’t plan to practice in those niches. Throughout my career, knowledge of seemingly unrelated aspects of law have proven extremely helpful, indeed necessary, to provide zealous representation in my chosen practice area.
But this assumes the bar exam can be competently given. Computer platforms are no longer some shiny futuristic marvel, full of promise but also full of glitches we’re damned to suffer for the sake of a hi-tech promise of the future. The fiasco in California cannot be shrugged away as the price to be paid for technology. And the cost to bar exam takers is very real, both in hard dollars and psychological torment.
Having royally screwed up, what can California do about it?
An unsigned email from the bar sent to the approximately 5,000 people who took the test called Tuesday’s array of problems “unacceptable” while admitting the licensing agency had been preparing for potential trouble before the first applicants logged on Tuesday morning.
“As such, we had already planned to offer a makeup opportunity on March 3 and 4 for those of you who had experienced technical issues beyond your control and were unable to connect to the platform and launch the exam as well as for those who were unable to complete the exam,” the email stated.
Bar officials said applicants may have the chance to retake the performance test portion of the exam or essay questions they couldn’t access. “Scoring adjustments” also are being weighed.
Cali is really pissed that some test takers put exam questions online, creating integrity problems for a retest, which in itself presents the problem of forcing test takers to suffer another round. Another proposed fix is to offer provisional admission, as happened during the Covid pandemic, although this is more palliative than cure if students still have to go back and pass the bar or ultimately get waived in with the knowledge that a not insignificant number of test takers who would have failed will now be let loose on the public with the title “lawyer.”
While it may have been more of an old man joke to question what was so bad about bringing number 2 pencils rather than a laptop to the exam, and there are a few students for whom handwriting is an archaic and unfamiliar form of communication, if the glorious future of technology can’t manage to pull a bar exam off, maybe it’s time to go back to basics, where the worst glitch was a broken eraser. But failure of this nature is inexcusable, and there is no “fix” that will make it any better.
Upon first read I saw this: “gave examinees the option of testing in person or remotely”.
I thought “What’s the big deal? Just take it in person.” Then I read this:
“Seth Feldman, an out-of-state lawyer sitting for the exam, said his in-person testing location in San Francisco with about 1,500 people was chaotic on Tuesday due to interrupting proctors, computer crashes, and a brief Internet outage.”
Apparently they not only botched the “remote” option by making it depend on untested technology; they also ruined the “in person” option by getting rid of the “pen and paper” exam and forcing everyone to do it online, even if they show up at a testing center.
At this point, the only solution is to leave California. I escaped in 2020 during the Covid hysteria, and businesses as well as people are still fleeing. Soon there will only be bums, politicians and illegals left behind in this politician-created hellhole.
When I sat for the Bar exam, California had just recently approved the use of laptops instead of the cuneiform tablets you greybeards used. At that time, the exam was still three days (not the current two) and I took the exam along with another 1,499 people in a large convention center. As you can imagine, a few computers bricked at the worst possible moment, but those unfortunate souls were able to soldier on, paper and pencil in hand. I can only imagine how the Feb ’25 test takers felt watching their futures potentially brick right before their very eyes.
Ahh, yes, returning to #2 pencils. Where the worst that can happen is that someone will dump all the answer sheets into the nearest river.
Admittedly, less likely than a techno glitch, but still….
Or space aliens can steal the answer sheets. Don’t forget about space aliens, Turk.
Miles…my comment about pencil-written test results being lost was a reflection of that which happened in July 1985 with those that took the exams in NYC in the passenger ship terminals on the Hudson. It affected 500+ plus people.
Whether it was a crime by a freaked-out test-taker or incompetence by admins remains to this day an unresolved mystery.
As someone who lugged an IBM Selectric II through knee-deep water (fortunately not uphill both ways) to take the in-person Oregon exam I have a small degree of envy for those who can bring/use a laptop these days.
But as someone who was an early adopter of computer technology (ah, the golden days of the Commodore Vic20, with cassette tape backup), I have zero sympathy for the people who, after forty years, *still* can’t seem to get it right when it comes to making that technology work, especially in areas that are, you know, vital to lives and careers and such..
The techie side of me says they should have contracted with Pearson Vue which competently runs a lot of IT certifications and they sure as hell should have tested with lots of users. The California hating Oregonian part of me says what did you expect from a state that makes Oregon’s government IT look competent? FWIW there has been a move in academia to make,students write exams with pencil and paper to thwart attempts to use AI to write essays
I hate to state the obvious, which no one has touched on yet. But if these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed fresh grads are frusterated and disappointed now, you just wait until they go into practice and discover how dysfunctional and frustrating the legal system really is when their boots/dress shoes hit the ground. It can be shocking and make you wish you had gone into medicine instead.
We thought about going to law school once upon a misguided time, but decided to become a client instead!?!
Did you mean “Medicine” or Mechanics?