And the bar exam is done … for now

Jump to Comments

I finished the last day of the California bar exam yesterday. The bar exam is inherently a stressful experience, but — thanks to an early and unfixable computer mishap — I think I earned a few extra gray hairs and lost a few extra years from my life expectancy.

It’s kind of ironic that I ended up being one of the people whose computer crashed and ate my exam answers: as a law student, I worked in the law library as a “Technology Consultant,” diagnosing and fixing problems with my fellow students’ laptops. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t really help me here.

But I digress. So, at 7:45 on Tuesday morning, I walked into day one of the bar exam (the California bar is a three-day exam, running from about 8 am to 5 pm each day), which took place in the Sacramento convention center. They have a long and very picky set of regulations on what you can and can’t bring in, so I was carrying my laptop in one arm, with a transparent plastic bag (no opaque bags allowed) in the other, containing my admissions ticket, pens, and earplugs (of the approved type, with no connecting strap).

You could feel the anxiety enveloping everyone, hanging in the air like the humidity of a muggy summer day in Boston. Everyone was milling around with their laptops and their little plastic bags, just feeding off of each other’s nervousness and fear and anticipation. I tried to avoid talking to anyone until I reached my seat, which was toward the front of the cavernous, concrete-walled space. (Thankfully, my seatmates were friendly and less anxiety-producing).

The three-hour morning session (three essays, each on a different area of law) went without any mishaps. We all typed our answers in to Examsoft’s Softest software, a “secure exam taking tool” that provides exam takers with a simple word processor and (to deter cheating) locks us out of all of the other functions of the computer. The answers remained saved on the computers, waiting to be uploaded later to Examsoft. And then everyone filed out for lunch — probably all as ravenous as I was, because eating is prohibited during the exam. I ate (thank you for the boxed lunch, Mom!) and then spent most of the rest of the lunch break in another area of the convention center with my eyes closed, taking deep breaths and trying to block out the presence of the other law students.

And then it was time to go back in for the afternoon session, a three-hour “performance test” in which you are given a packet of case law and a “client file” and instructed to write a legal document based on those materials. For the first hour and a half, my computer was happily humming along (well, I assume so — I couldn’t hear that well with my earplugs jammed in my ears). And then things started to slow down, a little bit at a time, with longer and longer hourglass cursors, until the top menu bar stated that Softest was “not responding.” Hmm. Not a good sign. I thought about getting some water (to get water, you have to get up and walk to a special area near the water cooler, because you’re not allowed to keep any water near the computers).

And then it happened. Windows crashed and went into the blue screen of death. Crapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrap. I decided to reboot. My computer’s response? Black screen, white type: “Missing operating system.” Tried again, same result. I thought about what I would tell someone who told me this story if I was working at the help desk: “Yikes, it sounds like your hard disk crashed. I hope you got your morning test answers uploaded. The answers are trapped on your computer until you upload them to Examsoft via the Internet. (And, to avoid further freaking out the user, I would wait until later to tell them that retrieving data from a crashed hard drive is only sometimes possible and might require the assistance of extremely expensive forensic data recovery specialists.)” I tried not to think about the fact that my morning answers had not been uploaded.

But the clock was still ticking. So, I turned off my sad, sad computer, got a bluebook from the proctors, and finished the performance test in a handwritten scrawl.

That night, my dad and I tried to get the hard drive up and running, with no success. Even with cooling fans running across it (to prevent heat damage), hooked up externally to another computer, the hard drive refused to spin up. We concluded that there was probably a mechanical failure and that recovering the data would require an expert.

I called the Examsoft tech support line, but reached a busy signal. Repeatedly. So I sent an e-mail to their support desk and decided to get some sleep before the next day of the exam.

Oh, did I mention that the California bar computerized exam rules state, in bold letters: “All exam files … must be uploaded no later than 10:00 a.m. (Pacific Daylight Time), Friday, July 27, 2007. If you fail to upload your exam files by the deadline, your answers from the examination will not be graded, and you will be given a grade of zero (0) for each answer not uploaded timely.” Before going to bed, I calculated whether it was possible to pass the exam even with zeroes on those three essays. Possible, yes. But very difficult.

And so, here I am, after finishing the two remaining days of the bar exam, after a bunch of exam day phone calls by my parents to Examsoft and the state bar (thank you, Mom and Dad!), with one fewer pen (it gave up the ghost after about eight hours of furious essay writing) and with a wrist that really, really doesn’t want to do any more writing. The bar is over … sort of.

The proctors tell me that the California Bar is waiving the Friday upload deadline in light of my circumstances, and that I’ll need to bring my dead laptop in to their San Francisco office (probably sometime next week) to see if recovery of the answers is possible. If they can’t recover the answers … I don’t want to think about that just yet.

Update: The aftermath

7 Comments

Filed under Bar Exam, California, Computing, Examsoft, Law, Personal