Law Schools

Massive Bar Exam Screw-Up Leaves Law School Graduates In Panic

Did you pass the bar exam? Good luck trying to find out.

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Imagine this: The bar exam results are supposed to be released on a specific day, and after waiting for months to see if you passed, on that day, you receive an email from the Board of Law examiners letting you know that “important information” has been posted to your account. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

Did you pass? Did you pass?! DID YOU PASS?!?!?!?!

You try to log in to your account, but you can’t. The page is down. You try reloading the page… but nothing happens. This happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again. After hours of trying to find out if passed the bar exam, you finally get the page to load, but the login option has been completely removed.

This is exactly what happened to recent law school graduates in Texas, beginning sometime yesterday afternoon. THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM, Y’ALL.

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Only some people were immediately able to see if they passed the exam, and others were forced to reload the page for hours to find out — if they were ever able to find out at all. Even Texas Supreme Court justices were scrambling on Twitter to try to assuage panicking test-takers about what was going on:

Law grads who reasonably expected to be able to find out if they passed the bar exam were incredibly pissed, as could have been expected given a screw-up like this:

* This is totally unacceptable. The servers go down, fine. But it’s a list. A list that has been prepared. Just release the list. Why put everyone through this. Tons of recent examinees will not sleep tonight, wondering if they should go back to their jobs tomorrow.

* Idk seems like this is something that should not happen. It’s actually agonizing. I’ve been refreshing the page since 4 p.m. I tried ignoring it to not put pressure on the server. But then they emailed me to say my scores are ready. Now I’m stuck refreshing again. I will not sleep till I know if I should go into the office tomorrow.

* I will never get this night back and I dont know if I will ever get over this stress. God forbid I wait this long, just refreshing a screen for now 8 hours, to fail.

While the site seems to be working this morning, some people still haven’t received an email from the Texas Board of Law Examiners letting them know that their results are in. Perhaps in an attempt to win back bar examinees, the pass list was recently publicly posted here — but good luck trying to get the page to load. It’s moving at a glacial pace, but will hopefully work… eventually.

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This is completely unacceptable. The way this was handled was atrocious, and we hope that this will inspire some server upgrades. No one should ever have to go through something like this when their futures are on the line.

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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