Plug in lawyer joke here

Via Spokesman: Fucked-up software prevented 645 new lawyers from taking the bar exam IN PERSON.

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For about 11 weeks, Guile had studied for the exam, which consists of three three-hour blocks and typically takes two days to complete. But after the Washington State Bar Association canceled the test on Tuesday due to a “technology issue,” Guile and nearly 700 other prospective attorneys who traveled to the Yakima Convention Center are unsure what will happen next. While the test was scheduled to begin at 8:30AM, Guile said applicants had trouble connecting to the Wi-Fi and the test nearly immediately. Guile said the on-site tech support “seemed like they weren’t familiar” with the software the test was administered on.

“There was this girl in front of me; they told her to restart her computer, like, four times. And every time, she would be like, ‘I’ve already done that,’ ” Guile said. “And they would be like, ‘Well, just do it again.’”

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Doesn’t make a lick of sense! The Wash state bar exam was in-person per tradition, but ALSO used some kind of courseware technology. Why bother with tech if the takers are there in the room?

The purpose of courseware tech is to enable VIRTUAL, not to enable PHYSICAL. The purpose of PHYSICAL is to FREE yourself from the cheating and mental laziness of tech.

I thought the bar exam was intensely physical, with lots of oral questioning and complex essays? Even if the tech was only part of the process, there aren’t a lot of simple multiple-choice questions in the parts of law you’d want to examine.

When you truly need a lawyer, you need a persuader and negotiator, not a fact-finder. Even before Google and Lexis, the facts were available in a library. Negotiating and persuading are the skills you pay for, the skills to measure for the credential.

[Flashing my own credentials: I’ve been writing courseware for 20 years. I know what it’s good for and what it’s NOT good for!]

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Later, law students on Reddit are discussing the failure and contemplating a suit against the bar association for delaying their careers. I wasn’t thinking of this lawyer joke! They also give some background info. Bar exams were physical, as I imagined them, until about 2014. Now they’re all virtual.