After sitting on pins and needles, New York bar examinees finally learned at around 11:56 p.m. last night that the results were available online. Finally, the moment of truth arrived for anxious prospective esquires hoping to begin a career in the Empire State. After nervously entering the appropriate login information, the website provided… nothing. Cautiously redoing the procedure to correct whatever mistake must have happened the first time yielded… nothing. The NY Bar of Law Examiners told everyone that the bar results were up at midnight and then forgot to open the gate to let anyone check.
Perusing Reddit thread titles provides a slice of the stages of grief.
Denial
Anyone else having trouble even logging on?
Anger
NYBOLE we did law school in COVID WAS THAT NOT ENOUGH
Bargaining
NY: seems like there are ppl who can see their score and ppl who can’t. Is there anyone who couldn’t but now can? FWIW I cleared my cookies & tried diff browsers and nothing
Depression
The NY Bar Examiners basically decided that doing law school completely online due to COVID simply wasn’t enough to heighten our anxiety and feelings of hopelessness, sent an email at midnight with incorrect information about exam results, and said fuck it we ball
And, finally, Acceptance
gn to everyone except the NY BOLE
Or perhaps this is the real essence of acceptance:
I don’t know how to take down the NY bar examiners but I will spend the rest of my life hating them.
And, as noted above, it seems as though some folks could see their results. Foreign LL.M. grads managed to get around the wall without problems, surely infuriating Federalist Society grads on multiple levels. A few users noted that they received results but were not an LL.M., raising hopes that the system was fixed, but to no avail.
Also making matters worse, it seems as though the one thing the site DID let people see was the apparently universally available button asking them if they wanted to sign up for July’s exam, which at least one Redditor interpreted as “they told me I failed but in a fucked up way!” Why does BOLE provide an option to register for July to people that pass? Have you not heard about New York’s “Super Mega Esquire” program if you get an even higher score on the test that means nothing to your long-term practice?
I made that up, but now I’m low-key terrified the NCBE is going to advocate that option in a bid to boost the $111 million they sit on for flogging this relic of a test with little to no public service value.
If we were the boomers running the NYBOLE we’d be calling the manager. This is a fireable mistake. Make no mistake about that.
As it turned out folks did try to call the manager, and NY BOLE stopped answering, offering instead a recorded message noting that they were working on the issue. Which is terrible customer service, but it’s hard to blame them for trying to manage call volume through a recording. And this is why it’s so stupid that they release these in the middle of the night. If there’s any risk of a screw-up, there’s no one around to handle the complaints, there are fewer IT all-stars to call if the in-house crew gets caught off-guard, and the examinees are left sleeplessly waiting for a fix.
Results seem to be available now, and maybe the furor will die down as people move on to celebrate passing the test and let this memory fade. But they shouldn’t. Folks should let BOLE know how bad this experience was and how they could make everyone’s life better if they’d at least drop these at a decent hour. It’s the simplest reform in the world, but they need to hear from you all about it.
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 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.
