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Software That Could Allow Applicants To Cheat On Bar Exam Available For About $100

Apparently hacking into the online bar exam is fairly easy.

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It’s possible that the whole point of the bar exam as a project is to keep people from having anything that the bar examiners might consider an unfair advantage on the test. Of course, bar examiners would recoil at phrasing it this way, but if the goal was to test minimum competency to be an attorney, the exam would reflect the skills attorneys actually employ, like conducting research to find answers. However, this isn’t at all what it tests and everything about the pandemic experience with bar exams confirms this with bar examiners oscillating between forcing people to subject themselves to COVID in order to ensure the integrity of the exam and pushing ahead with glitchy and racist tech solutions in a death drive to get something that ostensibly robs anyone of the sort of advantage they don’t want.

With a slew of ExamSoft online exams happening across the country next week, at least there’s no cause for alarm that someone out there might be undermining the integrity of the exam that the examiners seem to care so much about…

Oh dear.

To understand what these ads are talking about, you need to know how the online bar exam works. The testing platform doesn’t actually blast the exam to everyone on Monday morning. Much like the in-person proctors who hand out sealed booklets and instruct everyone to break them open at once, ExamSoft sends the exam to the applicant’s computer days in advance and decrypts it at the appointed time. And what these ads propose is that hackers are selling the decryption key to allow people to get started on the test early.

Assuming ExamSoft is on top of things, they’re changing around how they encrypt files with every administration to ensure that they stay ahead of these hackers. And if bar examiners have faith that the vendor has done this diligently then there’s nothing to worry about. Except….

In the immediate aftermath of Desktopgate — where multiple ExamSoft jurisdictions unexpectedly banned desktop computers days before the exam — a Redditor offered some thoughts as a computer expert on why this might be happening. While this was mostly an issue with external monitors, the author took some time to talk about security too and it wasn’t encouraging. In a nutshell, the update schedule suggests that the decryption code is already present on the computer — or will be at some point in advance of the exam — and given that ExamSoft historically uses hexadecimal codes, it could be cracked remarkably quickly.

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The takeaway here is that a motivated reverse engineer will have a cracker ready to run as soon as the exam files are downloaded to our machines. From there, it’s only a matter of time before the exam files are decrypted and distributable. If this happens before the exam starts, it will be fatally compromised. Worse, because this can all be done offline and the exam files extracted and distributed separately, it is literally impossible to know if somebody has succeeded in doing this.

Running a bar exam is as much about perception as anything else. If the public believes the exam is compromised, it loses all credibility whether or not it’s actually true. Right now, bar examiners across the country are on notice that someone might be able to distribute the test materials before it begins.

So far, the only bar examiner response we’ve seen to these sorts of issues is to stress that the code of conduct bans cheating like this. Fair enough. Though if the code of conduct is strong enough to overlook decryption keys, one wonders why they need to have draconian bathroom and food rules at all. Let alone why diabetics should have to skip their insulin. Either the honor system is good enough and we can dispense with all these rules or hackers sending around the test is a serious problem. It’s almost as if enforcing rules that treat applicants like children is more important than a severe risk of a hacked exam.

This is, to put it mildly, the wrong response to this claim. This is the sort of story that needs to be swiftly shut down with an emphatic statement that the exam really doesn’t work this way and that prior decryption keys won’t work with this year’s edition of the test. If that’s true, we should see statements within minutes.

But if that statement isn’t true… you’ve really got to wonder how bar examiners can close their eyes and go forward with this under these circumstances. After public health warnings, the mental fatigue of having the date jerked around, worries about crashing prior tests, racial bias in facial recognition tech, constant glitches, no technical support, now — finally — the vaunted “integrity” of the exam is in question. Now the examiners have a problem they actually care about.

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Unless we’ve got this wrong and they don’t even care about that. Maybe it’s really just sufficient if there’s something written that lets them yell at applicants about eating a bag of chips while declaring that 20 percent of people have failed, thus justifying the organization’s existence as the sentinal of public protection for another year. If that’s the case, the public really should be a lot more worried about the profession.

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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