It’s that time of year again. Somewhere in America, a law school graduate who spent the last two months memorizing the rule against perpetuities is now sitting in a convention center, praying the software boots up and the ceiling stays put. Given the track record, those are not idle worries.
For as long as there’s been a bar exam, things have gone wrong for the people taking it — sometimes spectacularly. Over the years, Above the Law has collected some doozies. Poop stories, birth stories, fires, seizures, bugs, tech issues, peeping toms, awful proctors, strokes… pretty much all manner of awfulness. Before we put out the call for this year’s batch, let’s take a stroll through the hall of fame.
The technical meltdowns. No tour starts anywhere but with ExamSoft. In 2014, the company delivered what we still call the biggest bar exam disaster ever, leaving thousands of test-takers across 43 jurisdictions unable to upload their completed exams as the deadlines ticked past, a debacle the internet promptly christened #Barghazi. The company’s response was to tell everyone to calm down, then apologize three weeks later while declining to refund anyone. The eventual class-action settlement worked out to $90 a head, less than what many had paid for the privilege of using the software in the first place. If you thought that was a one-time thing, ExamSoft came back in 2018 to prove otherwise, then spent the remote-exam era blaming graduates for its own failures — their internet, their lighting, their webcams — before the CEO surfaced to assure everyone that everything had been fixed, which, color me incredulous.
The medical emergencies. The exam has a nasty habit of not stopping for them. In 2020, a test-taker in Oakland had a seizure during the instructions and was wheeled out on a stretcher, laptop still in his lap, giving a thumbs up to the room. Just this past July, an applicant at Hofstra suffered an apparent heart attack and required CPR a few feet from other examinees, who were expected to keep writing. And then everyone broke for lunch.
The acts of God. Sometimes the universe editorializes. This summer, examinees in Hawai’i were evacuated mid-exam after an 8.7 earthquake off the Kamchatka Peninsula triggered tsunami warnings across the Pacific. There is no accommodation form for that.
The people paid to run the thing. In 2011, a proctor at Pace Law in White Plains tumbled down a flight of stairs minutes into the exam. In 2016, the proctors at the D.C. exam could not manage to tell time. As we’ve noted more than once, avoiding this stuff would require the people administering the exam to take it half as seriously as the people desperate to pass it.
And then there’s California. The Golden State turned the February 2025 administration into a genre unto itself. It was a disaster before it even started, so troubled that the Bar ended up offering full refunds to all 5,600 applicants out of sheer desperation. On test day it managed to be even worse than expected — login failures, crashes, lost submissions — after which the Bar floated adding still more chaos before finally crawling back to the NCBE it had spent years trying to escape.
We tell these stories every year — in 2011, 2012, and 2013, and on through 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025 — partly out of schadenfreude, and partly because the ritual telling helps the survivors process the trauma. Above the Law has been collecting them since at least the early 2010s, and the well has never once run dry. Which brings us to you.
So, here’s the important question… what crazy things are going on during the bar exam 2026? If you survived or witnessed some horror story in action, let us know. You can email it to us (subject line: “Bar Exam Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477). Maybe your story will inspire others to persevere.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
The post The Bar Exam Is Here, Which Means Something Is About To Go Horribly Wrong appeared first on Above the Law.
It’s that time of year again. Somewhere in America, a law school graduate who spent the last two months memorizing the rule against perpetuities is now sitting in a convention center, praying the software boots up and the ceiling stays put. Given the track record, those are not idle worries.
For as long as there’s been a bar exam, things have gone wrong for the people taking it — sometimes spectacularly. Over the years, Above the Law has collected some doozies. Poop stories, birth stories, fires, seizures, bugs, tech issues, peeping toms, awful proctors, strokes… pretty much all manner of awfulness. Before we put out the call for this year’s batch, let’s take a stroll through the hall of fame.
The technical meltdowns. No tour starts anywhere but with ExamSoft. In 2014, the company delivered what we still call the biggest bar exam disaster ever, leaving thousands of test-takers across 43 jurisdictions unable to upload their completed exams as the deadlines ticked past, a debacle the internet promptly christened #Barghazi. The company’s response was to tell everyone to calm down, then apologize three weeks later while declining to refund anyone. The eventual class-action settlement worked out to $90 a head, less than what many had paid for the privilege of using the software in the first place. If you thought that was a one-time thing, ExamSoft came back in 2018 to prove otherwise, then spent the remote-exam era blaming graduates for its own failures — their internet, their lighting, their webcams — before the CEO surfaced to assure everyone that everything had been fixed, which, color me incredulous.
The medical emergencies. The exam has a nasty habit of not stopping for them. In 2020, a test-taker in Oakland had a seizure during the instructions and was wheeled out on a stretcher, laptop still in his lap, giving a thumbs up to the room. Just this past July, an applicant at Hofstra suffered an apparent heart attack and required CPR a few feet from other examinees, who were expected to keep writing. And then everyone broke for lunch.
The acts of God. Sometimes the universe editorializes. This summer, examinees in Hawai’i were evacuated mid-exam after an 8.7 earthquake off the Kamchatka Peninsula triggered tsunami warnings across the Pacific. There is no accommodation form for that.
The people paid to run the thing. In 2011, a proctor at Pace Law in White Plains tumbled down a flight of stairs minutes into the exam. In 2016, the proctors at the D.C. exam could not manage to tell time. As we’ve noted more than once, avoiding this stuff would require the people administering the exam to take it half as seriously as the people desperate to pass it.
And then there’s California. The Golden State turned the February 2025 administration into a genre unto itself. It was a disaster before it even started, so troubled that the Bar ended up offering full refunds to all 5,600 applicants out of sheer desperation. On test day it managed to be even worse than expected — login failures, crashes, lost submissions — after which the Bar floated adding still more chaos before finally crawling back to the NCBE it had spent years trying to escape.
We tell these stories every year — in 2011, 2012, and 2013, and on through 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025 — partly out of schadenfreude, and partly because the ritual telling helps the survivors process the trauma. Above the Law has been collecting them since at least the early 2010s, and the well has never once run dry. Which brings us to you.
So, here’s the important question… what crazy things are going on during the bar exam 2026? If you survived or witnessed some horror story in action, let us know. You can email it to us (subject line: “Bar Exam Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477). Maybe your story will inspire others to persevere.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
