Bar Exams, Screw-Ups

Mis-scoring Of Bar Exam Continues To Haunt Impacted Students

"[I]t’s very difficult to make something this terrible right."

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test exam lastBy now you’ve probably heard of the Georgia bar exam scoring debacle. Over the course of the July 2015 and February 2016 administrations of the test, Georgia told 90 people they failed, when, in reality, they had not.

Yikes.

And as Erica Moeser, the head of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the organization that grades the multiple choice questions in the Multistate Bar Exam (note the error in this case came from grading the essays, which the Georgia Bar did), told Law.com, it is historically bad: “This dwarfs anything I’ve ever seen before. This is an error that goes back so long in time. The one from July of 2015—that in itself is unique, that it would be so long between the error and rectifying the error, if you will.”

Amid all this finger pointing, we don’t want to forget the people whose lives are drastically different because they thought they failed the most important test of their life. In our initial article on the issue, we noted the sad tale of one of the “failers” that lost their job because their boss believed they’d failed the exam. Now even more of the affected students are coming forward with their anger and questions.

From one “failer”:

1- How am I to believe it is an exact even, easy 90? That number is just too suspicious.
2- How am I to believe your office will “fix” this when you have clearly f**ked it up quite royally, at least 90 times, over the course of at least two separate and independent consecutive cycles.
3- How do I know it is not 135 errors? Or 147?
4- How do I know it is not the last three exams, or four?
5- Georgia has never allowed failers to get their essays back, unlike “practically every other state in the country,” including pre-UBE New York and Massachusetts.
6- Give me my essays back, for both cycles.
7- Send ALL “failers” from the last five years to an independent, outside state, and do it immediately.

Others have regaled us with tales of career setbacks that they are still working to overcome:

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Certainly, the Georgia Bar’s letter is a hollow gesture and aligns the Georgia Bar with a stereotypical legal response. What about the emotional distress, the expense in both time, cost, and lost employment opportunities? I personally know an individual who received one of these letters. And to the Georgia Bar, she lost the opportunity for two jobs as a result of their mistake. She retook the examination and passed it all well before the Bar notification was received. She has not been able to find a job, and the impact of “failing” the Bar has had a negative impact on her future in the practice of law.

And though Moeser commends the Georgia Bar for being forthcoming regarding the mis-scoring, others still have questions:

I know an attorney who suffered this….a pregnant one…

The real question is how long Georgia bar knew about this? Months? Who determined… and what did they do?

The impact of the mistake cannot be wished away, just because it was a regrettable mistake. As Moeser notes, that is something bar examiners are keenly aware of:

“It was an avoidable mistake, with sufficient quality control,” she said. “We all live in a world where we grasp the significance of this in people’s lives. It’s torturing the staff there, that this happened at all. They’re doing everything they can after the fact to try to make it right, but it’s very difficult to make something this terrible right.”

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It is hard to know what else the Georgia Bar can do, at this point, to make things right. Perhaps only litigation can tell us the dollar value of the harm.

Georgia Bar Exam Scoring Error Among the Worst Historically [Law.com]

Earlier: Georgia Mistakenly Tells People They Failed The Bar Exam

Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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