The bar exam is intended to be a test of minimum competency. Yet those who administer it have, time and again, demonstrated a lack of the minimum competency required to do their jobs effectively.
When I sat for and passed the Colorado Bar Exam in July 2019, like many test takers, I approached the entire ordeal with precise, systematic planning. Seven years later, most of the fine details have faded. I cannot recall the exact Denver venue where I spent two full days answering questions on subjects I haven’t thought about since. Nor can I explain the mechanics of committing abstract legal concepts to rote memory just to regurgitate them in the exact format examiners demanded. What remains vivid is the immense financial and logistical toll required simply to sit in that room.
Having never set foot in Colorado before, I flew out from the East Coast four days early to ensure that I’d be acclimated to the change in altitude. I booked a room at the brand-new Hilton Garden Inn Denver Union Station to guarantee a quiet study space and ate my meals from the Whole Foods across the street, pacing the aisles to find the right nutritional balance to fuel me through the test. I woke up around 3:00 a.m. on exam mornings—not to cram, but because I couldn’t sleep. In one of those early morning review sessions, I stumbled across an obscure mortgage concept that appeared on the test later that day. After Day 1, I picked up a coffee from the Peet’s next to my hotel and spent a few more hours grinding. I don’t remember whether we had to connect to Wi-Fi; all I recall is submitting my exam digitally in the evening after I returned to my hotel.
My strategy may have been unconventional, but it worked. I watched instructional videos from an online CPA prep program to grasp secured transactions (a topic I never quite mastered), and I spent the days after the exam concerned after realizing my response to a wills essay was largely non-responsive to the prompt. Two months later, I learned I had passed by a comfortable margin.
That success was not a reflection of superior intellect; it was the product of access to resources. I worked as a bartender throughout law school, kept my expenses minimal, moved back into my parents’ house in New Jersey to avoid rent, and served as a student representative for a test-prep company to earn a free bar preparation course, which runs several grand. With that, I was able to devote the better part of two months to focusing solely on mastering the bar exam. If required to take that same exam today with zero preparation—like most attorneys—I would undoubtedly fail. Furthermore, despite having passed the bar exam and maintained an active law license, I am no more qualified today to draft a complex trust instrument or draft a complex contract than I was as a first-year law student.
This fundamental inequity makes yesterday’s (July 28) administrative catastrophe during Day 1 of the July 2026 bar exam administration even more damning.
This week, some 700 test-takers traveled to isolated Yakima, Washington—more than a two-hour drive from the nearest major airport in Seattle—paying out of pocket for flights and scarce hotel rooms to take the newly rolled-out NextGen Bar Exam. What greeted them was a total institutional collapse.
As reported by Bloomberg Law, site-specific network bandwidth failures, widespread software errors, and server crashes brought testing to a complete halt, echoing similar technology breakdowns occurring simultaneously in Missouri. In Yakima, roughly 700 applicants sat trapped in total uncertainty for nearly six hours while administrators cycled through desperate workarounds.
Inside accounts from examinees and venue staff reveal that this collapse was entirely preventable. Local IT technicians had explicitly warned testing officials prior to exam day—and again at 8:00 a.m. that morning—that the venue’s network infrastructure could not handle hundreds of simultaneous users accessing the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) software platform. When IT warned that the NCBE’s proposed backup plan of rolling out testing in staggered waves would fail and kick connected users offline, testing officials pushed forward anyway.
Basic contingency planning was nonexistent: the NCBE representative reportedly forgot to bring dedicated Wi-Fi hotspots requested by tech staff, and the NCBE subsequently refused to allow local network boosters, citing rigid security protocols. To make matters worse, examinees with accommodations were forced to continue under fragmented, deeply inequitable conditions while the rest of the room was ultimately sent home.
By the end of the day, the exam was canceled outright. Applicants were handed a grim choice: return for a postponed makeup in September, delay their legal careers until February 2027, or withdraw for a standard refund.
The human cost of this administrative failure is staggering. Candidates with employment offers tied to passing the bar and housing leases starting September 1 are left stranded without income or answers. Examinees who drained their savings on nonrefundable travel and weeks of unpaid study time are now expected to absorb double the expenses and months of lost wages. In contrast to the NCBE’s cavalier approach, recognizing the severity of the disruption, local Yakima attorneys on Reddit began opening their homes to host stranded, exhausted examinees.
If a private enterprise inflicted this degree of financial and professional damage on paying consumers, it would face swift legal action for negligence and breach of contract. Yet state boards of bar examiners operate as extensions of state supreme courts, insulating themselves behind sovereign and quasi-judicial immunity. The institutional apparatus remains shielded, leaving vulnerable applicants to bear the full weight of the failure.
Throughout this crisis, examinees were told that local bar officials were constrained by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) guidelines and software requirements. This framing obscures a fundamental truth: the NCBE is merely a private, third-party vendor. It holds no legal authority over attorney licensing. Ultimate authority rests exclusively with state regulators. The NCBE works for the states, not the other way around.
When a private vendor’s proprietary delivery system fails catastrophically, state bar authorities don’t have to bow to vendor protocols. Washington State has the prerogative to tell the NCBE to pound sand. Rather than forcing applicants to absorb the fallout of a vendor’s technical negligence and the state’s poor planning, state officials can exercise their sovereign authority to bypass the NCBE entirely and grant immediate emergency relief—whether through emergency provisional licensing or diploma privilege.
The modern bar exam does not measure practical legal competence or ethical fitness. If the likes of Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman were recently deemed fit for admission, that should be rather telling. Attorneys who eventually commit egregious professional misconduct—as the Trump Justice Department lawyers do every day that ends in a Y—routinely pass on their first try, while highly qualified candidates without the financial cushion to endure months of unpaid study (or whose testing sessions are derailed by vendor technical glitches) are arbitrarily delayed or excluded from the profession.
The exam exists primarily to protect an occupational licensing monopoly and sustain a multimillion-dollar test-prep industry. State regulators owe these stranded examinees an immediate resolution today, just as they owe the public a permanent transition toward real-world licensing alternatives that offer actual consumer protection rather than government permission to engage in an occupation of one’s choosing.
What if applicants could sue state regulators and the NCBE for recovery of travel expenses and lost wages? What if decision-makers who act with deliberate indifference or gross negligence were held individually liable? Accountability would drive swift reform. Holding government officials and cartel-like bureaucrats personally liable creates a powerful incentive to do the right thing rather than look the other way as incompetence flourishes.
The botched administration of the bar exam illustrates why no government official should be cloaked in immunity. The financial pain and disruption of a botched test are bad enough, but the summary executions committed by ICE and Border Patrol agents in our communities are far more severe. Yet the solution remains the same: personal liability with zero immunity. Systemic failures persist only when actors face no personal consequences or professional repercussions.
