Sixty-Five-Year-Old Man Takes Bar Exam

One might think that I would have tired of typing earlier today, following six hours of entering essay answers on my notebook computer. Surprisingly, I have a little typing strength left before I hit the sack.

I awoke at 5:15 this morning and following the usual grooming, a quick walk of our dogs with Micah, and an equally quick breakfast, I left the house at 6:20 for the drive to the Jane S. McKimmon Conference and Training Center on the campus of North Carolina State University. There I joined about half of the North Carolina bar exam candidates for the administration of the Multistate Performance Test and the Multistate Essay Test. The crowd was alert and friendly. Once the check-in began, things moved quickly. The day went pretty smoothly, with one small exception. Each of the two MPT questions came in a separate, serially numbered booklet. Each candidate was supposed to receive questions with the same serial number. I and some nearby examinees were given booklets that didn’t bear the matching number. We were asked to line out our identification number that we had written on the booklets and add our initials. We then returned those booklets and were given “new” ones that matched, to which we added our ID number above where the prior possessor had lined through theirs.

As to the exam questions, I can say that I wrote a cogent answer to every question today. How well those answers hit the target set by the National Conference of Bar Examiners remains to be seen. I did not freeze up or blank out, successfully avoiding my greatest fear. On to the Multistate Bar Exam tomorrow: 200 multiple choice questions over six hours.