“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
The testing program locks down all other programs in XP… the user can’t access anything else.
With Bootcamp, locking down all the programs may still allow access to the OSX part of the drive, where candidates may have access to things that others don’t.
gow,
Yeah, it’s the TV numbskulls. It seems like every local station has several ‘professional meteorologists’. I try to watch the news (especially morning) and every ten minutes they’re giving the weather.
They go through a bunch of mumbo jumbo with their charts and radar. Apparently, whoever has the most powerful Doppler radar also has the biggest shlong. They babble for so long you usually don’t remember what the weather is supposed to be.
They can totally blow their prediction, but the next time you see them, not a mention of it. I guess they figure people won’t recall what they said anyway.
It used to be that all the stations had a cute weather girl who just read what the national guys said was going to happen. Took less than five minutes and was usually more accurate than they are today.
I’ve heard that the local stations make most of their profit from advertisements on the news. I guess that’s why a half hour news cast now drags out for two hours. I always love how they feed you teasers on the 6:00 PM news, and then say “details at 11:00”. Bastards.
Anyway, I guess what I really detest is the money grubbing lack of integrity that is so prevalent with the television news media. The weather guys are just an easy target.
No offense meant to the NWS, NOAA or other non-TV meteorologists.
Seems like the NY Bar software just wants to lock down the entire OS to prevent access to study notes etc.
It can’t do that in OS X. If using Boot Camp, the Mac user could just reboot and check some notes, then boot back into Windows and try to continue the exam.
If using Parellels or VM Fusion, its even easier… the NY Bar exam software cannot even detect that its running in virtualisation, thus a possible loophole for the candidates to check their notes. Yes, its unfair, but given how conservative this lot are, I can see their perspective.
Maybe any Mac developers fancy stepping up and offering to develop a OS X version of the NY Bar exam software to even out the playing field? (I’m not a developer, sorry)
Woody,
“but not Law & Order: SVU, because Ice-T is da bomb, and so is Chris Meloni.”
Ice-T is funny. But Meloni is a wiener. Even the woman kick his sissy ass. The only ones he can take are 100 pound dweebs who are handcuffed. He just loves to act tough and slam helpless people into walls. What a puss. I’ll bet he’s even worse in real life.
(If you’re being sarcastic, please disregard the above statement. Thank you.)
ANY Intel compatible computer manufacture that is barred from exams should sue.
With idiots like this, no wonder lawyers have such a bad name.
More evidence reinforcing that Lawyer stereotype, where most are assholes. And it starts at the top.
is isn’t the lawyers per se folks, it is the BAR, that is why years ago i created HELL – HELP END LICENSING of LITIGATORS.
apparently their software is doing some BARbaric low level stuff to keep people from using software that is not related to their exam.
this is NOT trivial, they probably have a good reason to ban macs.
What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start
Three guys walk into a bar, the fourth one ducks. (ba-dump-dump)
The Dude abides.
The other day I was using my new Apple iTele and passed a Galactic Bar during a teleport.
> If using Boot Camp, the Mac user could just reboot and check some notes, then boot back into Windows and try to continue the exam.
Could a savvy Windows user (yes, I know, a bit of an oxymoron) with a dual boot machine (say, with a Linux partition) get around the rules?
It is illegal to support a monopoly! For this reason, this institution
must be juged and punished!
Why allow people to use their own computers at all? Most tests with essay sections that I have taken over the past 20 years or so have used computers at the test facility. Nowhere near the same risk of cheating there.
The bar association produces lawyers, what do you expect?
@Sum Jung Gai
“The East Coast should just go back to England. We don’t need it!”
Ahem, we don’t want em either mate!!!
ApplePi,
You are clueless and out of touch.
Ever hear of Parallels? Or VMWare?
FOR WINDOWS?
Dude, your ignorance is mind-numbing and your rampant fanboi’ism makes you stupid.
Take your flaccid “argument” elsewhere.
@British Mac Head: you beat me to it!
To the gallows!!!
Makes perfect sense. You see, the “judge” often keeps important and useful information out of the courtroom. For the Bar, some “Judge” is keeping useful and important technology out of the exam. Perverted logic just permeates our legal system
@ Sir Gill Bates
In our local metro area, we have a station that compulsively advertises their “Storm Center” weather news applet. So here you are on a beautiful day, blue sky, sun shining, and this “Storm Alert” comes blasting across your TV warning of an impending colossal tornado or snow storm. Here they try to generate fear, cause when they kick in the “Storm Center”, look out Loretta, cause the grocery store shelves will be bare within the hour.
One poster says: ” 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.” [italics provided]
This in and of itself is unethical on the one hand, and on the other, puts the examiners at great risk should vital information on anyone’s personal computer become lost or end up in the wrong hands. And an OS that so readily lends itself to this kind of direct invasion of privacy should be banned. If this level of security is required for proper examination of candidates, then the examiners should provide the hardware – period.
Having worked within IT at a law firm I would guess that the Lawyers want to train the students that the partners simply don’t want to pay a penny more than they have to for something that doesn’t revenue earn (i.e. in the heads of the average law firm partner everything but them). Therefore Macs are out and the cheapest possible alternative is accepted, however rubbish it may be.
The trouble with law firms is they still have this idea that any IT money spent is for IT’s benefit. In reality the money isn’t for IT and often not even directly for the firm, it’s the CLIENTS’ data and protecting it that the spend is for. That message however doesn’t get through. All they are interested in is cutting costs.
It doesn’t stop them from screaming and shouting when the crappy systems this strategy results in crash all the time though. I’ve never worked amongst so many intelligent idiots as that time in “the law vertical”.
If they were smarter, wouldn’t they just put the exam in a web app? That way they could control the server platform it runs on, without dictating to people what system they need to use.
…oh, wait, except then they’d mandate an out-of-date browser like IE, wouldn’t they? God forbid someone use an ALTERNATIVE browser such as – *shudder* – FIREFOX! (dun dun DUN!)
‘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.’
…especially when you rely solely upon Windows. Doorknobs.
Most lawyers are unscrupulous bastards. I would have thought that cheating on the bar exam was a prerequisite to passing that exam.