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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.