I was reading (via MinnPost) an excellent Christian Science Monitor story — “Are iPads, smart phones and the mobile web rewiring the way we think?” — when I started to think of the potential implications for the 800 or so law students signed up to take the bar exam tomorrow at St. Paul’s RiverCenter.
The gist of the article is that new technologies have both made us smarter (by exposing us to and teaching us to navigate a wealth of information) and made us dumber (by reducing our capacity for deep thought through narrowing our attention spans.)
The bar exam is, of course, something where it would be helpful to have the capacity for deep thought. OK, OK, maybe you don’t need it for the multistate portion, but for the essay exams at least.
I called Margaret Corneille, executive director of the Board of Law Examiners, to see if there had been any changes in the technologies students can use since the antediluvian days when I took the exam. (As I recall, we just chiseled an A, B or C onto a stone tablet then.)
As it turns out, there’s only one major change – about 85 percent of test takers type out their answers on a computer rather than the old-fashioned furious scribbling into a blue book. However, no other computer assistance is available.
Thus, would-be lawyers from Generation Y have to leave behind their smart phones, iPads, iPods and other portable electronic devices. The Christian Science Monitor story tells the tale of one youngster who, stripped of his electronic gadgets for a week, wound up getting lost in his own neighborhood. Hopefully that won’t happen to any bar exam takers tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe somebody that clueless ought not to be a lawyer anyway.
Corneille told me that exam takers are only allowed in a pencil (on multistate day), a pen (on essay day) and “Kleenex.” The Kleenex, I suppose, serves the dual functions of letting you clear out your nose and giving you something to cry into if things don’t go your way.
But the current generation of lawyers need not worry. Despite their allegedly short attention spans, there is no evidence the bar passage rate is going down. Minnesota’s pass rate – which hovers at about 90 percent – remains one the highest in the country.
So what does all this electronic gadgetry mean for meaningful thought and discourse in the long run? I’d tell you, but my cell is ringing right now and I have a couple of e-mails to finish …
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You do use your own laptop if you want to go high-tech for the essay day. It’s a cumbersome pre-exam day process involving downloading and doing test-runs of a particular program that locks you out of the rest of your computer. The program is Windows-only, and if I recall correctly you couldn’t use a Mac even if you have Windows on your Mac. I’m a Mac user so I had to borrow a friend’s spare PC laptop for the exam in 2008. The laptop did not get along well with the bar exam program, and then the darn thing crashed. Twice. I had to handwrite portions of the exam. On top of that the laptop stopped working altogether when I tried uploading the exam. That night was sheer panic. I gave my laptop to one of the bar examiners the second day, and begged them to figure out a way to extract the files. I wasn’t able to find out whether they could read the files until a few days later. Then I was a state of massive anxiety waiting for the bar results, knowing that I wasn’t able to answer all of the questions and I didn’t know if anything was lost. I didn’t even send my BarBri books back because I was certain I’d need them again. Miraculously, I passed. Triple-checked to be sure. I guess the moral of the story is to make sure your PC laptop is in tip-top shape before the exam. A prayer or two wouldn’t hurt, either.
Thanks, Anne –
I recall there being Apple issues in past administrations. Maybe the bar doesn’t want folks who “Think different?”
Being an Apple user myself, I’m sensitive to these issues. I don’t know who the developer of the bar exam software is, but that company should take note. I would love it if I could tell Apple users taking the exam in the future, “There’s an App for that!”
Mark — I don’t pretend to understand the tech side of these things, but hopefully the bar exam software company can catch up with the times at a reasonable cost. It’s very hard for Mac users to find a friend or family member with a spare, usable PC laptop that they can borrow for the installation and test uploading process AND one full day of essays.
As an aside, I am very grateful to the law school classmate who let me borrow his spare laptop. Sure I panicked when it kept crashing, but I still passed. In the end, that’s all that matters (to me, anyway!).