The bar exam is stressful enough without a global pandemic turning life upside-down. Unless you were one of the 1,407 applicants who sat for New Jersey’s first-ever remotely administered bar exam in October 2020, it is easy to forget what a mess COVID-19 made of the most consequential test in an attorney’s career. The 930 applicants who overcame this formidable challenge received a score with limited portability, by virtue of their lacking the foresight to wrap up law school before a world-historic public health crisis struck. With the July bar exam around the corner (July 26-27), the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) should retroactively grant successful October 2020 applicants wider reciprocity.

The New Jersey Supreme Court adopted the NCBE’s Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) with the February 2017 administration of the exam. Ordinarily, the test renders a portable score, which an applicant may transfer to other UBE jurisdictions to gain admission. For example, an applicant who takes the UBE in New Jersey and notches a 268 may transfer their score to New Mexico, where the minimum score is 260, but not in Alaska, where the minimum score is 280.  More than 40 jurisdictions have adopted the UBE, though some, such as Utah, saw the disruption wrought by pandemic as an opportunity to reevaluate whether the bar exam was the most accurate and equitable measure of an aspiring attorney’s abilities.

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