Bar Exams

Some Truly Awful Things Can Happen During The Bar Exam

Time for the yearly tradition: bar exam horror stories!

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Bar exam 2017 has come and gone — nothing left now but waiting for the scores. But while you play the waiting game (and hopefully start packing for a killer bar exam trip) here’s something to distract you: bar exam horror stories!

Seems we play this game every year, as there seems to be an unending number of ways the day of the biggest exam of your life can get screwed up. Like this imgur user, who reports an actual tire fire outside of the testing center. Nothing like a bad omen…

View post on imgur.com

And there is this tragic story from the California bar sent in by an Above the Law reader. Apparently folks on their lunch break saw a car accident where there was a pedestrian fatality:

San Diego (CA bar exam). During lunch hour, car ran over and killed pedestrian. Several bar examinees saw. Hope they didn’t get crim law or torts in the afternoon.

Someone taking the New Jersey bar exam was unable to complete their exam due to a seizure:

[M]an on the floor, having what I firmly believe was a seizure. To add to this, those around the man were firmly planted to their seats, fearful of standing up in light of the no stand up rules during exam instructions. A Police Officer ran as fast as she could in his direction and performed the necessary medical attention (I believe involving you not swallowing or biting off your tongue?). The man was escorted out of the test room some 5 minutes later. After which, the proctor delivering instructions, in the most awkward resumption of reading instruction, continued.

No mention was made of the man.

Whereabouts unknown. Bar scores likely invalidated.

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But even making it to the exam is not a given:

all ready to take the bar exam yesterday morning, walked outside, and [] car had been towed.  tow truck called in by a neighbor

Another reader sent us in a tale of an annoying proctor (from a few years ago) with just a dash of mild racism thrown in:

Bar Exam Story: While I was I trying not to panic over an unforeseen essay topic, proctors kept tapping me on the shoulder to ask me about my (nonexistent) computer problems and then trying to give me booklets to write my exam by hand (why would I want to do that?!?). Each time I’d lose my train of thought and have to waste precious time explaining that I was fine and didn’t need help. After the fourth interruption, I finally realized that there was another Indian woman sitting behind me. The proctors couldn’t tell the difference between two brown people and apparently were unwilling to either count off Indian women (it’s the second one!) or check our desk tags to ID the right person. I passed despite running out of time to really finish that question.

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Another story from a few years ago, but man, is it an epic one:

I was already admitted to the Kansas Bar, but that was in 2012, so Kansas didn’t have the UBE yet. I practiced in Kansas City, so I had to take the Missouri Bar. The forecast called for a major snowstorm, so I drove out a couple days early. Got there and the hotel was very much the Bates Motel. It didn’t even have a table in the room. So I cancel my reservation that night and head to a Residence Inn. Come back to the hotel the bar is at the next day and try to study. The storm starts coming down late that night and is in full force by morning.

The morning portion of the bar goes okay. I thought I’d spend lunch wondering what in the hell ICWA was and looking at insurance sales positions on Monster.com. As lunch wraps up, we are all waiting to be let back into the testing room. Just as we’re getting ready to go back in, the power goes out. We’re in a hotel in a part of town that makes you wonder how Jefferson City could be the capital of anything (simultaneously making clear that it deserves to be the capital of Missouri), so it’s clear this outage is going to be pretty low on the totem pole of the power company’s priorities. The proctors tell us that we will reconvene in one hour and hopefully resume the test then.

Back to the car, with just enough time to really dive into the possibilities of becoming a realtor. We come back after an hour and the power is still out. More than just affecting the bar exam, this ruins pretty much every aspect of life for everyone there. People are, of course, still having to go to the bathroom, which presents you with two great options: (1) leave the door open and hope for a little sunlight to guide you, (2) close the door and use your phone’s flashlight (this was day one, so many people may have left their phones in their rooms). This raises a question that fascinates me to this day: how do blind people know when they’re done wiping?

Moving right along, as we’re shuffling off after being told to come back in 30 minutes, the power comes back. We think this has been sufficiently terrible and prepare to finish the essays. Lo and behold, the Internet is out! We sit around while the proctors troubleshoot this for a bit. Finally a few people get the software working and are ready to go and it seems like we’re about to be back to the test. Then the announcement: “Everyone put your computers away. The rest of today’s exam will be hand-written.”

Don’t remember much after that except going to Taco Bell, ordering about $10 of food, and heading back home on a two-hour drive so that I could get to work in the morning. Eating a substantial amount of Taco Bell at the outset of a two-hour drive was as bad of a choice as it sounds. I did ultimately pass, so it could have been worse, but I will not willingly be going back to that hotel or city.

And the bad news is it doesn’t always get better once the exam is over. Take this tale from Reddit user Kepleronlyknows:

Took the bar, felt like s**t, woke up this morning and my girlfriend of four years is breaking up with me. FML.

She claims she didn’t want to do it before so she wouldn’t mess up my studying, which is fair, but jesus, what a kick in the nuts. Plus I only moved to this state to be with her, so now I just took the bar in a state I have no real reason to stay in other than a one year job that probably won’t turn into full time. 100% blindsided too, I thought things were going well and was really looking forward to normal life with her once all the bar madness was done. I feel fucking sick.

Hang in there, maybe things will get better when you’re a real lawyer!

(What am I talking about, being an attorney is its own hellscape, as readers of this site surely know by now….)

headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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