NY Bar Association continues to bar Apple Macs from bar exam
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 - 07:30 PM EST "The rumor mill about bar exam horrors chugged steadily in June and July as thousands of recent law school graduates prepared for the grueling New York State Bar Examination," April Dembosky reports for The New York Times.This week, "test takers will sit for hours, proving their grasp of the intricacies of the law — from criminal codes to contracts. Some hope they won’t have to sit next to lip smackers or overzealous scribblers, others hope that their health will hold up," Dembosky reports.
"Many will be praying that their computers will not have a meltdown," Dembosky reports. "'There’s no guarantee when it comes to technology,' said John McAlary, the executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners. 'There’s always a risk that something can go wrong.'"
"The New York board has allowed candidates to complete the essay parts of the bar exam on their laptops since February 2003," Dembosky reports. "For all the stories of students having anxiety attacks in the exam room, there seems to be a competing number about their computers crashing and the specialized exam software going awry."
Dembosky reports, "For Mac users with bad handwriting, there is no keyboarding option. The exam software is designed to run on Windows systems, and the New York board included this clause in its laptop policy, warning in capital letters: WE DO NOT SUPPORT APPLE PRODUCTS IN ANY FORM INCLUDING INTEL BASED LAPTOPS RUNNING BOOTCAMP **NO EXCEPTIONS**'"
Dembosky reports, "Last summer, panic spread through various testing sites when the exam software – which locks down all programs and files except the exam – malfunctioned. Hundreds of laptop users who navigated back to a previously completed essay found a blank screen. In the months following the exam, Mr. McAlary said, the board salvaged all but 47 essays. Some of those candidates passed or failed regardless of their score on the lost essay, leaving only 15 that were given an estimated score. Nine of them passed the bar, six didn’t."
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Davis Machead" for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: One headline, three bars! We win! As for the rest:
"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist." - George Bernard Shaw


So, the big question to these cretins should be "What's the problem with running Bootcamp?" It must be pure Mac ignorance.