Thoughts on the WA bar exam

I sat for the bar exam in Texas last year. I was seated next to this woman and the way that UBE worked last year, I don't know what they're doing now. You did all of the written portions of the bar on the first day and you did multiple choice on the second day. So you brought your laptop on day one to type out all of your essays. The woman I was seated next to didn't have a laptop. Turns out she had failed to register her laptop by the prescribed deadline. She failed to download whatever software you needed to take the bar. So she had to write all of her essays by hand. Both of her MPTs, all six of her MEEs. She wrote it all. Paper, pencil. That was it. Mind you, with the software you can copy-paste, you can move text around, you can write something, obviously delete, change the words, tweak, whatever. She's over here paper pencil. Can't move things around, can't rearrange pages. She's writing manually. And I remember looking at her and thinking myself, nothing could ever possess me to handwrite my bar exam. I would give up before I did that. If I was in the middle of nowhere Washington yesterday and they told me I couldn't take my bar exam, I would say, hand me a pencil and a booklet and I'll get it done. It is insane to me that we are in the 2026th year of our Lord and a state bar was unable to administer a professional licensure examination because of Wi-Fi issues. You had to send 649 or whatever the number of it was, people away because of Wi-Fi. And we had no backup. We had no backup system in place? We didn't say, let's hand out 650 booklets to have everyone at least, at least take the exam? Even setting aside the pencil and paper, every single exam that I took in law school was offline. We downloaded an exam software where you had text boxes and you could separate line by line by line, indicate what question, what essay you were writing. None of it was on Wi-Fi. It all got uploaded to a server somehow and then you submitted it. And then I think when you reconnected to Wi-Fi after the exam, it automatically submitted your exam. You mean to tell me we didn't have something like that in place for the Washington State Bar yesterday? You had to send and then you have the audacity to tell them, "yeah, come back in September." "Just come back in September" as if people don't have jobs they're starting in September. They don't have life plans. It is already so grueling to eat, sleep, and breathe bar prep from graduation in May until the bar exam in July. And you mean to tell these people that they have to endure that for two more months? They have to retain all of that information for two more months? Have all of that stress and anxiety for two more months? Come on. I genuinely hope the Washington State Supreme Court and Washington Bar do the right thing and grant this emergency diploma privilege because it is unconscionable to ask these bar applicants to resit for this exam in September or in February. That's just insane. And how do we not have? You had no backup? No plan B???