I don’t want to say I’m Cassandra. But when we flagged yesterday that, with the bar exam here, something was about to go horribly wrong, it wasn’t exactly a bold call. Something goes wrong every year. The only questions were how, and how badly. Washington answered both on Tuesday.
[READ MORE HERE: About bar exam horrors in Missouri and Maryland]
The state’s debut of the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam — the first-ever operational administration of the NCBE’s big, skills-based reinvention of attorney licensing — didn’t just go badly… it just didn’t happen, like at all. After roughly six hours of starting, stopping, and staring at wifi that never worked, the examinees gathered at the Yakima convention center were sent home Tuesday afternoon without answering a single question. By Tuesday evening, the Washington State Bar Association had cancelled the whole thing, Wednesday’s second day included, because it no longer trusted the technology to work.
Here’s how the not-a-test unfolded, according to ATL tipsters and Reddit posters who lived through it. The crux of the problem, apparently, was 600-plus people in one room trying to get onto the same network at the same time, each on their own laptop, to take an exam that runs entirely through the NCBE’s software. The 8:30 start came and went. Examinees sat while staff “worked on the internet” for hours. By around 11:30, roughly a third of the room had connectivity and the rest didn’t, at which point the plan became: start the exam for the people who could get on. The room booed. The WSBA’s general counsel — by all accounts the one person on-site doing her best, relaying updates over a microphone as she got them — called the NCBE, and secured everyone lunch and a 12:45 restart instead.
Chat: the internet did not fix itself over lunch. Organizers tried again anyway, for the lucky few with a connection. The NCBE app crashed or failed to load for most of them. Then the head proctor’s internet went out. No one ever actually started the exam. Examinees describe people crying and throwing up in the convention center. In the moment they were told they could take a refund or come back in February, which is not what test taker who have spent the better part of two months cramming for the exam want to hear. Finally they were sent home with word that testing would resume the next day and continue to Thursday, many already scrambling to extend hotels in a city a long drive from Seattle, where two of the state’s three law schools sit, with ruined flights and no representation that anyone would be reimbursed for any of it.
Then it turned out there would be no next day at all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because to hear NCBE’s (the folks that design the exam, remember) version of events, this was but a blip on the radar. According to their statement, today was an “historic milestone in legal licensure” with the “inaugural administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination” and “The NextGen testing platform performed as expected throughout today’s administration. Most applicants successfully completed day one testing as scheduled, and the overwhelming majority of testing locations across participating jurisdictions administered the examination without incident.”
As for what went down in the Evergreen state, it said this, tidily pointing the finger:
Washington: Most standard-time applicants were impacted by site-specific network bandwidth issues. After extensive efforts by local testing staff and the convention center technical support, the jurisdiction determined that the bandwidth issues could not be resolved in time to complete today’s administration, and applicants were dismissed for the day. The jurisdiction is evaluating next steps, including whether testing can resume tomorrow or whether affected applicants will instead be offered an opportunity to sit for a future administration.
And Washington did evaluate its next steps and, in an email from the WSBA to applicants (available in full below), they called the entire July bar administration off. “With deep regret,” the email begins, Washington’s July 2026 administration was cancelled; there would be no attempt on Wednesday because the association did not have “sufficient confidence that the technology issues have been resolved.” And then came the word the NCBE never managed: “We sincerely apologize.”
Applicants were handed three options, with a decision due by August 14. They can sit for a makeup exam the WSBA is working to schedule with the NCBE, tentatively September 1 and 2, and in Tacoma, not Yakima. They can transfer their application to the February 2027 administration, also in Tacoma. Or they can withdraw entirely for a full refund of their WSBA application and exam fees, though the NCBE’s separate technology fee is a conversation applicants will have to have with the NCBE themselves. The WSBA said it would work with the Washington Supreme Court on any further steps.
Every one of those options shares a feature: each one bills the applicant for a failure the applicant did not cause. More travel, more hotel nights, more weeks of unpaid limbo, or a withdrawal which seems like a nonstarter for people who, you know, want to practice law in the state. The shittiness of the options was highlighted by a (rightfully) irate ATL tipster:
Career Disruptions: Many applicants have firm start dates, judicial clerkships, or financial obligations in August that depend on completing the bar in July. Pushing the exam into September destroys start dates and prolongs unpaid study periods.
Uncompensated Financial Losses: Applicants spent significant money on travel, hotels, and travel arrangements for Yakima — costs that are not being reimbursed.
Mental and Physical Toll: Months of rigorous preparation were derailed by five hours of waiting in a hot, crowded convention center with zero answers, only to be told to hold their lives on pause for another five weeks.
Of course, there is a fourth option the WSBA did not list, and the Washington Supreme Court knows it well. In June 2020, with the pandemic turning in-person testing into a public-health gamble, the court granted emergency diploma privilege to graduates of ABA-accredited law schools, admitting them to the profession without an exam at all. Grads who wanted a portable UBE score could still sit for a later administration; everyone else got to start their careers. The sky did not fall. The state went back to the exam the very next cycle anyway. If there were ever a moment to renew the call for it — a licensing failure so complete that the jurisdiction scrapped its own exam and apologized for the technology it was built on — a class of grads who showed up, did everything right, and were sent home without a test would seem to be it.
But as regular ATL readers know all too well, tech failures at the bar exam aren’t new. California turned a bar exam into a genre unto itself last year — login failures, crashes, lost submissions, refunds handed out in desperation. The bitter irony writes itself: California’s meltdown is a big part of what pushed states back toward the NCBE and its NextGen exam in the first place. The NextGen exam has been in development since 2018 — eight years — and debuted like the ExamSoft catastrophe of 2014 (the original bar exam IT nightmare story) had never happened. What is new, however, is calling a mulligan on the entire exam before anyone even got a chance to answer any questions.
Earlier: The Bar Exam Is Here, Which Means Something Is About To Go Horribly Wrong
California Bar Exam Managed To Be Even Worse Than Expected
California’s Bar Exam Fiasco Enters Next Stage Of Stupid
A Bar Exam Disaster For The Ages
Read the email from the WSBA below:
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 Washington Just Called Off Its Entire Bar Exam appeared first on Above the Law.
I don’t want to say I’m Cassandra. But when we flagged yesterday that, with the bar exam here, something was about to go horribly wrong, it wasn’t exactly a bold call. Something goes wrong every year. The only questions were how, and how badly. Washington answered both on Tuesday.
[READ MORE HERE: About bar exam horrors in Missouri and Maryland]
The state’s debut of the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam — the first-ever operational administration of the NCBE’s big, skills-based reinvention of attorney licensing — didn’t just go badly… it just didn’t happen, like at all. After roughly six hours of starting, stopping, and staring at wifi that never worked, the examinees gathered at the Yakima convention center were sent home Tuesday afternoon without answering a single question. By Tuesday evening, the Washington State Bar Association had cancelled the whole thing, Wednesday’s second day included, because it no longer trusted the technology to work.
Here’s how the not-a-test unfolded, according to ATL tipsters and Reddit posters who lived through it. The crux of the problem, apparently, was 600-plus people in one room trying to get onto the same network at the same time, each on their own laptop, to take an exam that runs entirely through the NCBE’s software. The 8:30 start came and went. Examinees sat while staff “worked on the internet” for hours. By around 11:30, roughly a third of the room had connectivity and the rest didn’t, at which point the plan became: start the exam for the people who could get on. The room booed. The WSBA’s general counsel — by all accounts the one person on-site doing her best, relaying updates over a microphone as she got them — called the NCBE, and secured everyone lunch and a 12:45 restart instead.
Chat: the internet did not fix itself over lunch. Organizers tried again anyway, for the lucky few with a connection. The NCBE app crashed or failed to load for most of them. Then the head proctor’s internet went out. No one ever actually started the exam. Examinees describe people crying and throwing up in the convention center. In the moment they were told they could take a refund or come back in February, which is not what test taker who have spent the better part of two months cramming for the exam want to hear. Finally they were sent home with word that testing would resume the next day and continue to Thursday, many already scrambling to extend hotels in a city a long drive from Seattle, where two of the state’s three law schools sit, with ruined flights and no representation that anyone would be reimbursed for any of it.
Then it turned out there would be no next day at all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because to hear NCBE’s (the folks that design the exam, remember) version of events, this was but a blip on the radar. According to their statement, today was an “historic milestone in legal licensure” with the “inaugural administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination” and “The NextGen testing platform performed as expected throughout today’s administration. Most applicants successfully completed day one testing as scheduled, and the overwhelming majority of testing locations across participating jurisdictions administered the examination without incident.”
As for what went down in the Evergreen state, it said this, tidily pointing the finger:
Washington: Most standard-time applicants were impacted by site-specific network bandwidth issues. After extensive efforts by local testing staff and the convention center technical support, the jurisdiction determined that the bandwidth issues could not be resolved in time to complete today’s administration, and applicants were dismissed for the day. The jurisdiction is evaluating next steps, including whether testing can resume tomorrow or whether affected applicants will instead be offered an opportunity to sit for a future administration.
And Washington did evaluate its next steps and, in an email from the WSBA to applicants (available in full below), they called the entire July bar administration off. “With deep regret,” the email begins, Washington’s July 2026 administration was cancelled; there would be no attempt on Wednesday because the association did not have “sufficient confidence that the technology issues have been resolved.” And then came the word the NCBE never managed: “We sincerely apologize.”
Applicants were handed three options, with a decision due by August 14. They can sit for a makeup exam the WSBA is working to schedule with the NCBE, tentatively September 1 and 2, and in Tacoma, not Yakima. They can transfer their application to the February 2027 administration, also in Tacoma. Or they can withdraw entirely for a full refund of their WSBA application and exam fees, though the NCBE’s separate technology fee is a conversation applicants will have to have with the NCBE themselves. The WSBA said it would work with the Washington Supreme Court on any further steps.
Every one of those options shares a feature: each one bills the applicant for a failure the applicant did not cause. More travel, more hotel nights, more weeks of unpaid limbo, or a withdrawal which seems like a nonstarter for people who, you know, want to practice law in the state. The shittiness of the options was highlighted by a (rightfully) irate ATL tipster:
Career Disruptions: Many applicants have firm start dates, judicial clerkships, or financial obligations in August that depend on completing the bar in July. Pushing the exam into September destroys start dates and prolongs unpaid study periods.
Uncompensated Financial Losses: Applicants spent significant money on travel, hotels, and travel arrangements for Yakima — costs that are not being reimbursed.
Mental and Physical Toll: Months of rigorous preparation were derailed by five hours of waiting in a hot, crowded convention center with zero answers, only to be told to hold their lives on pause for another five weeks.
Of course, there is a fourth option the WSBA did not list, and the Washington Supreme Court knows it well. In June 2020, with the pandemic turning in-person testing into a public-health gamble, the court granted emergency diploma privilege to graduates of ABA-accredited law schools, admitting them to the profession without an exam at all. Grads who wanted a portable UBE score could still sit for a later administration; everyone else got to start their careers. The sky did not fall. The state went back to the exam the very next cycle anyway. If there were ever a moment to renew the call for it — a licensing failure so complete that the jurisdiction scrapped its own exam and apologized for the technology it was built on — a class of grads who showed up, did everything right, and were sent home without a test would seem to be it.
But as regular ATL readers know all too well, tech failures at the bar exam aren’t new. California turned a bar exam into a genre unto itself last year — login failures, crashes, lost submissions, refunds handed out in desperation. The bitter irony writes itself: California’s meltdown is a big part of what pushed states back toward the NCBE and its NextGen exam in the first place. The NextGen exam has been in development since 2018 — eight years — and debuted like the ExamSoft catastrophe of 2014 (the original bar exam IT nightmare story) had never happened. What is new, however, is calling a mulligan on the entire exam before anyone even got a chance to answer any questions.
Earlier: The Bar Exam Is Here, Which Means Something Is About To Go Horribly Wrong
California Bar Exam Managed To Be Even Worse Than Expected
California’s Bar Exam Fiasco Enters Next Stage Of Stupid
A Bar Exam Disaster For The Ages
Read the email from the WSBA below:
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
