Examination Ruminations

Good to be finished with that. The understood going in that the bar exam was going to be pretty terrible. However, I failed to appreciate the extent of its crappiness. This year they had it at a hotel, the embassy suites in Montgomery. Imagine almost a thousand applicants, sitting within a foot of each other, filling a room the size of an arena football field. We did this for 5 different 3 hour tests in 3 days. WEAK FREAKIN’ SAUCE. I am not an anxious person by nature. On the other hand, I think I’m pretty laid back. Not that my heart pumps ice water or anything, just I’m not typically a mash of emotional distress. However, the nature of the bar is such that it induces nervousness. It’s basically a gigantic psychological experiment.

First of all, 2 days of it is handwritten. That’s 9 total hours of solid scratching. Think about the last time you wrote anything by hand. Was it, “remember to buy toilet paper”? Was it written on your hand? Yes, of course it was. That was rhetorical. There is no other reason to ever write anything by hand in an age where you trip over computers when you get out of bed. Aside from thank you letters to elderly relatives, any sort of information is more easily and accurately conveyed through a more contemporary medium. Further, my handwriting is horrible. I mean really bad. It looks like it’s done by a gorilla using his non-dominant hand, except a monkey doesn’t use and thoroughly misspell obscure words. The bar was all in pen too, so any mistakes that I made had to be scratched out and then rewritten. Here’s a typical sentence from my answer booklet. “Thus, the employee’s endorsement was conncurrent (scratched out) concurant (scratched out) con (fuck it) happened at the same time as her conversion.” Technically, they are not supposed to count against you for spelling and grammar. I guess we’ll see.

Second, everyone there is high strung. Honestly, it’s a valid reason to be stressed out. If you fail you are completely embarrassed, and more importantly completely unemployable. This would be manageable except for the fact that some of the examinees will fail. Everybody knows this fact, and that understanding colors the entire process. Being surrounded by a giant mob of people who all have their immediate futures riding on the results of an exam is an exhausting experience.

Anyway, it’s over. Time to read Harry Potter.