Honestly, I can’t with these people.
After forcing people to take tests in the middle of a pandemic with an admittedly safer but also messed up online exam, one would assume the nightmare was over for applicants. You would be incorrect.
“An error accord” indeed.
It appears as though 15 applicants were mistakenly informed that they passed. How does something like this happen you might ask?
The scoring error occurred when an applicant identifier was entered into a database spreadsheet twice, causing a limited number of other applicants’ scores to be misaligned and assigned to the wrong applicant. The Office of Bar Admissions worked immediately to investigate and correct the error, which unfortunately resulted in eighteen applicants having been informed incorrectly about their Bar Exam results. Three applicants who had been informed they did not pass the exam were told yesterday they had passed. Fifteen applicants who had been informed they passed the exam were told yesterday that they did not pass.
Alright, mistakes like this happen every year. A buddy of mine was told he failed and then got called a couple days later and was informed “oops, no, you passed,” which was the more awesome form of this sort of error. But after the traumatic hell these applicants were put through for absolutely no reason, the very least that bar examiners could do is double-check the results. Can they not grasp that the stakes might just be a little higher right now? Or are they just moving forward with fervent banality as if everything this October was “just another bar exam” for everyone?
Of course not. They couldn’t even be bothered to double-check their spelling.
Tipsters who’ve contacted us about this story keep saying that they hope we rip these examiners a new one, but I just don’t know what else to say. It’s just issue 8,635,843 with these senseless exams at this point and I feel like eviscerating this specific screw up would almost belittle the string of catastrophic bullshit that led up to here.
There is a better way to license attorneys. We have tons of smart people working on that right now. And this dogged insistence on a generalist memory test — when practicing law is both specialized and by definition open-book — is lunacy. Grading mistakes can happen in any test, but that the 2020 bar exam journey ended with this emotional knife-twist is just an extra layer of cruelty on a system overflowing with it.
Whether it’s the bar association or a state supreme court or an independent agency, no licensing agency should walk out of 2020 without committing to a serious, ground up rethinking of how we do this as a profession, asking the hard questions about what skills we want to guarantee lawyers possess and what approach we want to take to make sure attorneys have them.
UPDATE: Oh, so this is the “good” news.
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.