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Florida Calls Off Wednesday Bar Exam... Just Like Everyone Knew They Would

The technical issues just kept adding up.

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The Florida bar exam should have been called off when Indiana realized the ILG-provided platform wouldn’t support its far smaller test. The Florida bar exam should have been called off when its own test couldn’t even be run because of rampant issues. It definitely should have been called off before the Board of Bar Examiners went public claiming that everything was fixed — despite all indications to the contrary — and staked their reputation on a Monday trial run.

After all these off-ramps along the way, the Florida bar exam was called off at roughly ten to 11 p.m. on Sunday night. If that seems irresponsibly and cruelly close to the Wednesday testing date, note that many of us expected them to wait until today’s test failed and then call off the Wednesday exam sometime Tuesday morning. So, I guess… this is better?

The Florida Board of Bar Examiners, with the approval of the Supreme Court of Florida, announces that the bar examination that was scheduled for Wednesday, August 19, will not go forward. Despite the board’s best efforts to offer a licensure opportunity in August, it was determined that administering a secure and reliable remote bar examination in August was not technically feasible. In addition, the live trial of the examination software scheduled for Monday, August 17 is also canceled.

Ahem…

If only they’d known about these technical problems earlier! Surely they found themselves totally blindsided to learn that the platform wasn’t ready! Why wasn’t someone out there was explaining last week that the test wouldn’t work if they went into the weekend without having run a test?

But the Board called us all crazy for having these concerns. They went out of their way to issue statements assuring everyone that these were relatively trifling hiccups and that the test would go on. Assuming they weren’t trying to lie to everyone last week then they were deep, deep into lying to themselves until Sunday.

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I don’t know if there’s any way at all to reach the population of grizzled attorneys who have forfeited the last shred of human sympathy long ago, but just consider the work that went into preparing for the bar exam and then consider the last two weeks leading up to it was marked by the state failing to meet its pre-test deadlines and then ultimately canceling it overnight giving most applicants a little over 48 hours of notice. Try to imagine taking the useless knowledge crammed into your head in the home stretch before the test and being told that you’ll just have to hold onto that until… October… maybe?

The board remains committed to offering an examination to applicants in 2020 and will reschedule the examination for a date to be determined in October. The October examination will have the same content as the examination that had been scheduled for August. The board will announce the date and other information for the October examination in the coming weeks. When this information is announced, August 2020 applicants will have the opportunity to take the October examination or to postpone to the February 2021 examination.

This amounts to about a month and a half, and while this is a decent amount of time to fiddle with a relatively finished piece of software, the experience of the month that passed from the Indiana bar exam until now fails to provide a lot of confidence in that project. But delusions are hard to dispel and the one that took the examiners all the way until 11 on a Sunday night is still fundamentally unshaken as they want us all to know that they’ve got a PLAN to hold this test in October.

And now we’ve reset the clock to string along these applicants again. Another month of promises, glitches, public relations jockeying, and almost inevitable missed deadlines. Maybe in October applicants will get a whole week’s notice when they cancel the test in lieu of a December administration!

What’s the Sherlock Holmes maxim? Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth. Safely executing the bar exam in 2020 is impossible. It’s time for licensing authorities to begin from that premise and see where it takes them. It could well lead to a better long-term solution.

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Earlier: Florida Bar Exam Will Go Next Week… Maybe? Hopefully? Oh God.
Florida STILL Doesn’t Have A Working Bar Exam Platform. Test Is Next Week, By The Way.
Florida Cancels Test Of Online Bar Exam Because, You Know, ‘Issues’
Online Bar Exam Software Still Not Working On Friday, Test On Tuesday
NCBE President Gives Trainwreck Of An Interview

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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