Laptops and the Texas Bar Exam

It's been a grueling week, but the verdict is in - I am glad I typed the Texas Bar Exam.

Tuesday morning we just had the MPT to type in a 90 minute session. The Texas Procedure & Evidence exam was still handwritten in short 5 line paragraph responses to 40 questions. After 90 minutes of that, I could tell my hand just could not handle a full 6 hour essay writing session like we had today. The endurance session on Day 3 of the Texas Bar Exam involved 12 questions on Texas essay subjects and I just KNOW there is no way I could have written as much by hand in the same time frame. (Whether or not typing could make up for the fact that I could not study for the Bar Exam like I originally intended is another issue)

Apparently, this was the largest group ever to elect to use ExamSoft to take the Texas Bar Exam (roughly 350 applicants in the Pasadena (Houston) laptop testing location by my count) and there were just a handful of folks that ran into some technical problems apparently due to firewall, antivirus, or AOL configurations from what I hear. Something a little different from what I'm used to - although we all made backups of our submissions on floppy disks, many of the exam files were actually uploaded to ExamSoft servers through the convention center's wifi connection (or, for those folks that didn't upload them at the convention center, they have until 10pm tonite to do so). I, for one, liked having an email confirmation at the end of each exam session before I disconnected my laptop.

So, is it worth the extra time, money, and risk to type the Bar Exam? I don't have my score yet, but if I do have to take it again (gasp!) - I would definitely opt to type it.