California Bar Software Gets Drunk

This is what happens when you don't take the bar in pencil.

Hello, bar exam takers. We hope everything is going well. If you are taking the February Bar because you failed the one in July, take heart; things can’t get any worse.

Well, unless you are in California. Things certainly got “worse” for some test takers in Ontario and Pasadena yesterday. Really, it’s the kind of exam screw up that you would expect from New Jersey.

Read on for the gory details….

Multiple tipsters report that there was a total clusterf**k with the ExamSoft test-taking program near the end of the California Bar. Here’s a good report:

I knew something was up when I saw a dude get pissed and hit his laptop really hard, causing shock in the Ontario test center. Another guy yelled “what the F! I can’t believe this…”

The issue was that Examsoft wasn’t outputting text correctly. Every time one of those with the glitch typed they would get random spaces and omitted letters. This made it difficult to impossible to finish the PT, which for those unacquainted with the CA Bar, requires a huge fact dump that many insert towards the end of their 3 hour time limit. Not being able to type at this point means a low PT score, which means a potential autofail on the CA bar.

The best part of the situation was at the end of the session the California State Bar employees tried to pawn the error off on the takers’ computers and Examsoft to the first complainers. One of the reps refused to take complaints down and said loudly to those within listening distance: “this isn’t a BAR problem, this is a EXAMSOFT problem, we can’t do anything for you!” She even tried to stop other CA Bar employees from taking notice of the problem. It wasn’t until 10 or so people had approached the table all at once and the students started realizing that this wasn’t individual computer error issues that one of the California Bar employees said “okay, we better escalate this,” and only at that point they began taking the names of those impacted (shows that the CA Bar’s policy is to lie/ignore/deflect until the issue is too big to resolve). Even when the group grew in size, one of the bar employees still attempted to argue that there was nothing the bar could do, and only Examsoft could resolve their problem.

I do have a very clear picture in my mind of the California bar taker who first encountered this problem. I think it looked something like this:

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Joking aside, a poster at Top Law Schools has started a very helpful thread for people who were affected by this problem. If this happened to you and you thought you were the only one, you are not alone. Contact your site rep. Hopefully the California board of law examiners will make the appropriate adjustment to your score.

And good luck to everybody taking the bar exam this week.

California Bar Softest Glitch During PT 1 (Report it) [Top Law Schools]

Earlier: Is the New Jersey Board of Law Examiners Incredibly Incompetent or Willfully Negligent? You Make The Call.

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