Good news: the woman who collapsed during the New York bar exam at Hofstra reportedly survived. That’s worth saying up front because nothing that follows should overshadow that.
But now that we know she’s alive, we can get back to the other glaring issue: What in the actual hell is wrong with the people running this exam?
When we first covered this story, we called the Board of Law Examiners seeking a statement and learned that they weren’t answering their phones because — apparently — they’re out of the office the rest of the week after the bar exam. Because why might anyone need to contact the people running the bar exam immediately after the bar exam? However, the Board eventually did make a statement claiming that their “priority” was the candidate suffering a medical emergency.
The passive voice… the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Witnesses — plural — disagree with this assessment. Several examinees took to social media to describe the situation and while details differ, the consistent theme is that test-takers sounded the alarm that someone needed help and the proctors seemed temporarily reluctant to act and in all events refused to stop the test as if firing up the defibrillator and yelling “clear” was just another ambient noise on par with a cough or dropped pencil.
Note that the test-taker they got on camera appears to be using a pseudonym. Bar examiners signaled during COVID that they were willing to retaliate against critics, making people reluctant to call them out. Aside from everything else, the fact that examinees even entertain the idea that speaking up for someone who almost died might cost them their license amounts to a genuine legitimacy crisis. If the bar examiners can’t be trusted to accept “perhaps don’t let people die” as a note, their reputation as a good faith actor is shot.
Writing on LinkedIn, another examinee shared their experience:
On day two of the bar (MBE day) about 15 minutes before the end of the AM session a young woman sitting about ten feet from where I was sitting collapsed. Initially, people around her thought she was experiencing a seizure, but it soon became clear that it was more serious than that. The proctors urged everyone in the area to continue their exam and began to attend to her, but there was nobody on hand with medical expertise. The proctors did not make an announcement asking if there was a medic in the room (of which there almost certainly was given that there were over a thousand examinees in the room) as they would on an airplane. Examinees did not have their phones and so could not call 911 and proctors were hesitant to do so for some reason, only calling for help after students begged them to. It took about ten minutes until campus security arrived and began to administer CPR and another couple of minutes until a defibrillator was brought. All the while, examinees were told to continue their exam and stay in their seats. I literally saw students scribbling away on their exam papers at the table right behind the young woman, just inches away from where medics were administering chest compressions to try to save her life. Proctors didn’t bother moving the examinees in the immediate proximity to clear space for the medical personnel once they arrived. Only after the session was over did they allow people to leave their seats.
So when the Board says the tests were “quickly collected and the candidates were dismissed for lunch” it’s like saying the Titanic “concluded its journey early.” It’s trying to create the impression that the proctors put a stop to the test as opposed to the event happening close to the scheduled end of the session. That’s just clumsy ass-covering because it’s an easily discoverable detail. It’s also such a stupid deception. A breakdown that delays medical attention carries series legal implications so they can be expected to spin that response, but the decision to stop the test for everyone else during the emergency is a separate matter. If they said, “we think our proctors dealt with the medical emergency appropriately, but we acknowledge that in the future the test should have been immediately suspended for the other examinees and will develop new protocols for this” they wouldn’t be conceding anything while showing at least some sense of the gravity of the situation.
But they couldn’t bring themselves to do that because it would require admitting — for even a second — that something might be more important than this dumb test.
That, more so than even the response in the moment, is the real indictment of the bar exam as an institution. They’ve had time to think about this and they still can’t comprehend a response that might involve stopping the test. The ritual cannot be compromised!
The woman survived. But the legitimacy of the bar exam remains in the toilet. And if the best the Board can offer is a press release version of “we did everything right,” then maybe they’re more out of touch than we even thought.
Joe 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 or Bluesky 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.
The post Bar Applicants Call B.S. On Examiner’s Account Of Test-Taker Suffering Cardiac Arrest appeared first on Above the Law.
Good news: the woman who collapsed during the New York bar exam at Hofstra reportedly survived. That’s worth saying up front because nothing that follows should overshadow that.
But now that we know she’s alive, we can get back to the other glaring issue: What in the actual hell is wrong with the people running this exam?
When we first covered this story, we called the Board of Law Examiners seeking a statement and learned that they weren’t answering their phones because — apparently — they’re out of the office the rest of the week after the bar exam. Because why might anyone need to contact the people running the bar exam immediately after the bar exam? However, the Board eventually did make a statement claiming that their “priority” was the candidate suffering a medical emergency.
The passive voice… the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Witnesses — plural — disagree with this assessment. Several examinees took to social media to describe the situation and while details differ, the consistent theme is that test-takers sounded the alarm that someone needed help and the proctors seemed temporarily reluctant to act and in all events refused to stop the test as if firing up the defibrillator and yelling “clear” was just another ambient noise on par with a cough or dropped pencil.
Note that the test-taker they got on camera appears to be using a pseudonym. Bar examiners signaled during COVID that they were willing to retaliate against critics, making people reluctant to call them out. Aside from everything else, the fact that examinees even entertain the idea that speaking up for someone who almost died might cost them their license amounts to a genuine legitimacy crisis. If the bar examiners can’t be trusted to accept “perhaps don’t let people die” as a note, their reputation as a good faith actor is shot.
Writing on LinkedIn, another examinee shared their experience:
On day two of the bar (MBE day) about 15 minutes before the end of the AM session a young woman sitting about ten feet from where I was sitting collapsed. Initially, people around her thought she was experiencing a seizure, but it soon became clear that it was more serious than that. The proctors urged everyone in the area to continue their exam and began to attend to her, but there was nobody on hand with medical expertise. The proctors did not make an announcement asking if there was a medic in the room (of which there almost certainly was given that there were over a thousand examinees in the room) as they would on an airplane. Examinees did not have their phones and so could not call 911 and proctors were hesitant to do so for some reason, only calling for help after students begged them to. It took about ten minutes until campus security arrived and began to administer CPR and another couple of minutes until a defibrillator was brought. All the while, examinees were told to continue their exam and stay in their seats. I literally saw students scribbling away on their exam papers at the table right behind the young woman, just inches away from where medics were administering chest compressions to try to save her life. Proctors didn’t bother moving the examinees in the immediate proximity to clear space for the medical personnel once they arrived. Only after the session was over did they allow people to leave their seats.
So when the Board says the tests were “quickly collected and the candidates were dismissed for lunch” it’s like saying the Titanic “concluded its journey early.” It’s trying to create the impression that the proctors put a stop to the test as opposed to the event happening close to the scheduled end of the session. That’s just clumsy ass-covering because it’s an easily discoverable detail. It’s also such a stupid deception. A breakdown that delays medical attention carries series legal implications so they can be expected to spin that response, but the decision to stop the test for everyone else during the emergency is a separate matter. If they said, “we think our proctors dealt with the medical emergency appropriately, but we acknowledge that in the future the test should have been immediately suspended for the other examinees and will develop new protocols for this” they wouldn’t be conceding anything while showing at least some sense of the gravity of the situation.
But they couldn’t bring themselves to do that because it would require admitting — for even a second — that something might be more important than this dumb test.
That, more so than even the response in the moment, is the real indictment of the bar exam as an institution. They’ve had time to think about this and they still can’t comprehend a response that might involve stopping the test. The ritual cannot be compromised!
The woman survived. But the legitimacy of the bar exam remains in the toilet. And if the best the Board can offer is a press release version of “we did everything right,” then maybe they’re more out of touch than we even thought.
Joe 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 or Bluesky 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.
The post Bar Applicants Call B.S. On Examiner’s Account Of Test-Taker Suffering Cardiac Arrest appeared first on Above the Law.
