A glitch in a popular system to upload bar exam answers and essays failed temporarily this week, according to Fox News and the Associated Press. This means that the students’ answers were not uploaded or sent to state websites.
The popular software platform is ExamSoft and it takes care of digital bar exam submissions for multiple states. The technical issues occurred on Tuesday of this week and caused many graduates to have issues completing their exams, which are required to practice law.
Bar associations from 20 states had to extend their submission deadlines due to the glitch.
The testing session on Tuesday was held for the essay portion of the two-day exam and it takes six hours to finish. There were some test takers who said it took the same amount of time to submit their completed tests.
“There’s a lot of stress with this exam. It’s on your mind throughout law school,” Recent UNC Law School grad Satie Munn said in an interview with Fox News. “Tension is already high on that first day after all the time you put in preparing. It’s like an instant panic attack when you are unable to send your essays in. I think it was sort of a breaking point for a lot of people.”
An apology was issued by ExamSoft that said the following: “We apologize to the affected exam takers for the delay in processing their answer files last night. We understand that it is a stressful time for bar exam takers, and their experience last night was unacceptable to us.
“Due to a technical reason that we are still investigating, it took us approximately six hours longer than usual to process all of the exam takers’ answers onto our servers. As of very early this morning, the backlog of answers was nearly fully processed and those who are uploading their exam files are not currently experiencing a delay.”
The company assured the graduates that the answers they submitted were not deleted from the computers or the system. The company also said that the graduates will be able to submit the answers in time for the extended deadlines.