“The rumor mill about bar exam horrors chugged steadily in June and July as thousands of recent law school graduates prepared for the grueling New York State Bar Examination,” April Dembosky reports for The New York Times.
This week, “test takers will sit for hours, proving their grasp of the intricacies of the law — from criminal codes to contracts. Some hope they won’t have to sit next to lip smackers or overzealous scribblers, others hope that their health will hold up,” Dembosky reports.
“Many will be praying that their computers will not have a meltdown,” Dembosky reports. “‘There’s no guarantee when it comes to technology,’ said John McAlary, the executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners. ‘There’s always a risk that something can go wrong.'”
“The New York board has allowed candidates to complete the essay parts of the bar exam on their laptops since February 2003,” Dembosky reports. “For all the stories of students having anxiety attacks in the exam room, there seems to be a competing number about their computers crashing and the specialized exam software going awry.”
Dembosky reports, “For Mac users with bad handwriting, there is no keyboarding option. The exam software is designed to run on Windows systems, and the New York board included this clause in its laptop policy, warning in capital letters: WE DO NOT SUPPORT APPLE PRODUCTS IN ANY FORM INCLUDING INTEL BASED LAPTOPS RUNNING BOOTCAMP **NO EXCEPTIONS**'”
Dembosky reports, “Last summer, panic spread through various testing sites when the exam software – which locks down all programs and files except the exam – malfunctioned. Hundreds of laptop users who navigated back to a previously completed essay found a blank screen. In the months following the exam, Mr. McAlary said, the board salvaged all but 47 essays. Some of those candidates passed or failed regardless of their score on the lost essay, leaving only 15 that were given an estimated score. Nine of them passed the bar, six didn’t.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Davis Machead” for the heads up.]
One headline, three bars! We win! As for the rest:
“The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.” – George Bernard Shaw
So, the big question to these cretins should be “What’s the problem with running Bootcamp?” It must be pure Mac ignorance.
i read on the nyu law school website that intel macs with bootcamp aren’t even allowed during lectures.
But they will allow them to charge outrageous fees to future clients.
If they’re aware enough to know about Bootcamp, wouldn’t they know that Macs running Windows under that program are essentially operating as native Windows computers?
Maybe it’s an IT idiot who doesn’t understand the idea. I used to work with Mac-haters like that in a former job.
The New York State Bar are racists!
They’ll be hearing from me!
MDN/MW: ‘results’. I’ll be gettin’ some.
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”
‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens
I’m gonna sue the sonsabitches!
Amazing. Half of the law students at Lewis & Clark law school in Portland use Macs. The East Coast should just go back to England. We don’t need it!
Barring it, even though bootcamp or parallels can run that silly OS Windows just proves that the IT management there are Windows Fanbois. They hate anything Apple, because their reasoning for barring Apple is just pure hate and ignorance.
WE DO NOT SUPPORT YOUR BULL SHIT NO EXCEPTIONS
Another case of ignorance.
Shakespeare said it best ” First thing we do is kill all the lawyers “.
Is it a coincidence that most of our Senators and Congressmen are
lawyers by trade and education ? No wonder this country has the problems that don’t seem to get addressed by Congress.
“It must be pure Mac ignorance”
There’s a lot of ignorance among Mac users, pure or not.
“They hate anything Apple, because their reasoning for barring Apple is just pure hate and ignorance.”
Law school exam software needs to lock the PC down pretty tightly, so that accessing any reference material, pre-written essays etc on the PC is impossible. It usually re-boots the PC so that it only runs the exam software. My guess is that Boot Camp is somehow incompatible with that process.
“First thing we do is kill all the lawyers “.
No problemo. Who’s next?
How about meteorologists? They tick me off.
Nah… SBG… I vote we kill off the stock analysts next.
Jim – TIV,
A most excellent choice. I bow to your better judgement.
But I still wanna get those blasted weathermen.
The New Bar is discriminating.
Easy… they want to support only ONE platform. They don’t want to have to keep up with Macs running bootcamp. A student could easily just SAY they were running bootcamp and then be running parallels. The NY BAR doesn’t want to have to deal with that variable.
They know that they can lock down the computers to everything except the exams.
Some of the Mac users here are both clueless and out of touch.
It’s a difficult test and they’re doing their best to suss out the cheaters or prevent them from doing so.
As a law firm IT guy, I am not surprised by the NY State Bar antics. Law is one of the most conservative and technically backward professions in existence. To give you an example, most lawyers still prefer and use Word Perfect. I bet most readers did not even realize Word Perfect still existed.
Fortunately, pockets of enlightment are spreading in law. As Sum Jung Gai noted, half of the Portland attorneys-in-making are using Macs. At legal confences I am seeing the % of Macs increase steadily and significantly every year. And earlier this year in the American Bar Association’s Law Practice monthly magazine, the cover story covered in detail the advantages to switching from PCs to Macs.
The bottom line is that the tide is changing in law as it is in all business with respect to Macs. Those lawyers who refuse to change and improve are destined to join blacksmiths, buggy makers, and abacus users on the slag pile of history.
“What’s the problem with running Bootcamp?” It must be pure Mac ignorance.
OH THE IRONY of such ignorance, displayed displayed by people giving a test to measure mastery of intricacies.
Is this really ignorance, or pure anti-Mac bigotry?
What if an aspiring suit covered up the Apple logo on their MacBook and took the test with Boot Camp anyway?
I understand an unwritten part of law school is learning how to get ahead any way you can. Why not do it this way?
Sir Gill Bates…
I’m a meteorologist, have been for 20 years… your point? Or is it just the untrained ignorant “weathermen” you hate?
I’d like to plant my boot up his stinkin’ arse!!
That’s it! I’m boycotting Law & Order from now on, including Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but not Law & Order: SVU, because Ice-T is da bomb, and so is Chris Meloni. Rawr.
Shall we guess that their software has no way to stop a Mac from compromising its security? Likely that if someone boots into OS X during the exam they’ll be able to otherwise bypass the software. Obviously the problem is that the NY Bar has not INSISTED the software be designed to work with Macs. Hiring a professional Mac developer might be a good first step. Or a good SECOND step after requiring them to do this in the first place.
How is an Apple computer running Windows any different than a Dell or HP? Exactly, it’s not.