Yesterday, Michigan joined Indiana in offering an online bar exam this summer in lieu of forcing students to pack into a convention center. Right on queue, the first online administration of the LSAT offered welcome news for online haters with tales of glitchy security problems — exactly the sort of stumbling blocks that the NCBE claims prevents them from moving the UBE online.
As Law.com has it:
Most of criticism leveled by early LSAT Flex takers on the popular online forum discussion Reddit was directed toward the online proctors, which were supplied by ProctorU—a third-party test security vendor. ProctorU provides live proctors who monitor test takers through the cameras and microphones of each taker’s computer. ProctorU also uses artificial intelligence and humans to review recorded video from those computers to catch cheating. But some Reddit users said their proctors were an hour or more late to log them into the test, leaving them hanging at an already stressful time.
This tracks what we heard from tipsters, who also identified ProctorU as the weak link:
Just finished taking the LSAT-Flex. Apparently, lots of people had a long wait for a proctor after they signed in. Other people are talking about issues with proctoring. My proctor took over my cursor for several minutes during the analytical reasoning section. A friend’s proctor disappeared and she isn’t sure if her test submitted while another person’s test just shut off in section 1 and when she tried to re open it it said test submitted and the proctor was gone.
So much for the panopticon.
While we’re going to hear a lot about these breakdowns, the real lesson to draw from this is that the test ran pretty smoothly all things considered. This process was rushed into place due to the pandemic and frankly it’s impressive it worked at all. There are definitely folks with vested interests in maintaining the bar exam status quo, but glitches are invitations to more experimentation, not support for shutting everything down.
If people want a full-complement bar exam in 2020, they’ll need to offer it online. It’s as simple as that. Figure out how to get the proctoring right because failure isn’t really an option here. The longer states drag out this decision, the more difficult it will be to have a real exam.
Online LSAT Makes Its Debut—With a Few Glitches [Law.com]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.