The new Washington bar exam could not demonstrate minimum technical competence
In what seems like a story from the late 1990s, and not 2026, Washington’s bar-licensure task force wanted to wait until 2027 to give their new high-tech exam time to “work out any issues with its administration.” The state Supreme Court chose 2026. You know what happened next…
Roughly 645 aspiring lawyers couldn’t get their laptops to connect to the Wi-Fi or do whatever the National Conference of Bar Examiners software was supposed to do. The bar exam had to be canceled, sending their budding careers into turmoil.
Recent law school graduates spend months studying for the bar exam. They often spend thousands of dollars, too, paying for test prep materials, travel, lodging, childcare, and other costs in order to sit for the multiday ordeal that their job prospects depend on. They forgo personal obligations and rearrange their lives because their livelihoods are at stake.
They should not have to live like this. And Washington has recognized for years that it doesn’t need to make them do so. In July 2020, for instance, when the COVID-19 pandemic made it too dangerous to administer the bar exam, the state supreme court issued a one-time grant of “diploma privilege.” This allowed graduates of accredited law schools who were applying for bar admission at that time to become licensed attorneys without taking the exam.
By Wednesday afternoon, the deans of all three law schools in Washington sent letters to the state supreme court urging it to grant diploma privilege to those affected by Tuesday’s fiasco. “Diploma privilege presents—by far—the most equitable remedy,” said Anthony Varona, dean of Seattle University School of Law. Tamara Lawson, dean of University of Washington Law School, similarly identified diploma privilege as “the only equitable remedy” that would make sure “the financial, professional, and emotional burdens of this catastrophic failure are not shifted to the test takers.”
“Ready for launch” met the Yakima Convention Center.
This kind of testing software is mostly a solved problem. Maybe the eventually newly minted lawyers can go after the folks who negligently set things up. (The issues, from the training I've had to do for lower-level tests, are mostly about preventing ever more sophisticated cheating methods. Can't wait till the meta glasses become more widespread.)
So if they couldn’t take the test, how do we know that they would have passed? Set up a time for a manual re-test, cover basic costs for the test takers and then grade the results.