Law Schools

Bar Exam Catastrophes That'll Give You Nightmares

Time for the yearly tradition: bar exam horror stories!

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Today is the final day of the July 2019 administration of the bar exam, and come 5 p.m., there will be nothing left for would-be lawyers to do but await their pass/fail fates. Here are some things to distract recent test-takers while they play the months-long waiting game and make other members of the legal profession chuckle as they take in the schadenfreude: a collection of this summer’s bar exam horror stories.

As Above the Law readers know all too well, there are numerous ways the biggest exam of law school graduates’ lives can get screwed up. Take, for example, what happened during the MBE at testing centers in Minnesota and D.C. earlier this week:

  • Minnesota bar examinee here: in one of the exam rooms we had some sort of news/talk radio audio piped in through the commercial speakers (it’s held at an event center) off-and-on for several minutes during the exam. I imagine several enraged people have already contacted you with tips about this.
  • The MN bar had sports talk radio coming over the PA for the first 10-15 minutes of the MBE this morning. Great trying to take the most important exam of my life with that distraction.
  • In my afternoon session in D.C., the proctor gave my room a 30 minute warning when we had 45 minutes, then proceeded to call time 15 minutes early. When that happened, I, as well as several other examinees, told the proctor we believed that was incorrect. She did not believe us initially, and had to consult with the other proctor in the hallway. In the meantime, we were instructed to put pencils down. When the proctor finally realized her mistake, several minutes had elapsed, and no examinees were given back that missed time. And that’s not even the full of it! Proctors allowed examinees to leave in the last 30 minutes, chatted with each other, and walked in and out of the room pretty much nonstop.

That must have been incredibly annoying, but at least you know your Scantron sheets were in the right hands when they were collected after the exam. What if you uploaded your essays to ExamSoft and they just disappeared without a trace into the wilds of the internet? That’s what seems to have happened to this test-taker in California:

Twice they tell you at the exam that if you don’t “upload” your answers by August 1, you will lose ten points on each essay you did not upload. If they don’t get it in two weeks, you get zero on the test. So, on Tuesday night I uploaded my bar exam answers. The software company (ExamSoft) who receives it sends you an email that says, “For additional confirmation of your upload, visit your personal account page. To do so, log in to your institution’s portal and select ‘History.’” So I get on my personal California Bar web page and there is (a) No “History” I can select, and (b) No notice that they ever received my bar exam answers. So, I called the California Bar and the lady had no idea what I was talking about. She says they do not ever acknowledge whether they receive an exam and it goes directly to the people who grade you. So, now I get to lose sleep about this until November.

That’s certainly going to be an excruciating wait, but perhaps what was even more excruciating for one test-taker was the thought that he wouldn’t even be able to make it to the exam thanks to a series of canceled flights. Check out this disastrous story:

The day (Monday) started out pretty normal. I got to the Champaign, IL airport, which is very small, for my connecting flight to Chicago about an hour before the flight was set to take off. A few delays later and rescheduling to a later connection to that was to arrive in Buffalo around 5 pm, my flight to Chicago was cancelled. Well crap… so I quickly got on the phone with the firm I’m starting at in the fall to ask if they would reimburse a cab to Chicago to catch my connection. They said of course, so I jumped in a cab and got some studying done. About an hour from O’Hare I heard a large bang… the cab had a flat tire.

So now I’m stuck on the side of the highway trying to get an Uber. Uber isn’t too crazy about side of the highway pick-ups, so after about 30 minutes standing in the rain, my Uber was finally able to find me. An hour later I’m standing in the security line at O’Hare, thankfully in time to make my connection. My phone buzzes. Flight to Buffalo canceled.

I call the airline to find a way to Buffalo. They ask if I want a flight leaving around 9 p.m., getting in at 11:30. After asking if I can get on another airline, this wonderful airline (bless their heart) says because my delay was not over 24 hours they cannot put me on another airline. Sooo I take the flight and proceed to ask a gate agent, “No b.s., will this flight make it to Buffalo so I can take the bar in the morning?” She looks at the radar, looks at me… “Errr if I were you, I would go get a rental car.”

I’m faced with a split second decision, get a car now to get there ASAP and drive or risk it with the flight. Thankfully, my wonderful girlfriend was about 45 minutes from O’Hare and offered to drive me and I picked the rental car for the peace of mind. She drove me all night and I got about two hours of sleep in the car and I arrived in Buffalo around 4 a.m., just in time to sleep a little before my 7 a.m. alarm. My girlfriend (the real MVP) drove straight to the airport for her 5 a.m. flight back to Illinois to meet the movers before our move to Brooklyn.

The adrenaline kept me going and surviving on day one. Day two felt like a breeze after that.

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Holy crap, after all of that insanity, we sincerely hope this guy passes the test!

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve got a happy little story from Arizona, where someone’s spouse surprised her after the exam with a mariachi band:

Congratulations to everyone who finished the July 2019 administration of the bar exam. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for you!

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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