And The Award For Worst Board Of Law Examiners Goes To...

Utter failure from state bar examiners.

If you think about it, there shouldn’t be any bar exam administrative debacles. Something like ExamSoft should never be allowed to happen. Every state has its own board of law examiners, and these folks simply have to administer and score a test. It’s amazing that every year, at almost every administration of the bar exam, there is some kind of comic failure from those in charge of administering the exam.

Of all the bar exam failures we’ve covered, this one is the most cruel. It’s terrible to tell students that they’ve passed the bar when they actually failed. But telling them the night before the swearing-in ceremony is among the worst things I’ve ever heard….

Pretty much everybody from Nebraska emailed us this story from the Omaha World-Herald. Apparently, three people were called the night before swearing in ceremonies and told that they had failed the bar, while another three who thought they failed were told they passed.

Those damned clerical errors, you know. From the World-Herald:

In what is being described as a rare but unfortunate mistake, the Nebraska State Bar Commission had incorrect test scores for 11 of 171 test-takers who took the most recent test in July. The error came to light this week.

For five of the 11, the scoring errors didn’t change the final outcome. But for the other six, well….

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“This is awful. We deeply regret an error occurred. I feel horrible,” said Tricia Freeman, a Sarpy County prosecutor who was appointed to the state bar commission, which oversees the administration of the bar exam.

“We are all, obviously, incredibly pained,” said Nebraska State Supreme Court Justice Mike Heavican, who is in charge of the bar commission. “We are all lawyers and went through the process and remember how terrible it was waiting for bar exam results. We realize this is an absolutely excruciating thing. We understand the gravity of all this and like everything else that we try to do — we’re going to learn from our mistakes.”

Said Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners: “This is every bar examiner’s worst nightmare. I’m feeling awful right along with them.”

Your worst nightmare? No, I think it’s the worst nightmare of the people you told passed the damn thing.

Apparently, the national group of graders in Wisconsin didn’t properly add the MBE score from one spreadsheet with the essay scores from another spreadsheet. So, yes, somehow were dealing with a mistake that Micrsoft Excel could have saved us from in 1994.

Officials are now promising “fail-proof” systems. But no system can totally overcome human error and incompetence. It’s just amazing that these people make it sound like grading the bar is more complicated than taking it.

He was due to be a lawyer in 24 hours; then his phone rang and everything changed [Omaha World-Herald]

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