Oops! Clerical error leads to mistake in Nebraska bar exam scores; three didn't pass after all
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The day before ceremonies on Thursday to swear in new lawyers in Nebraska, three would-be lawyers got some bad news. They didn’t pass the bar exam after all.
But the news was good for three other test takers, the Omaha World-Herald reports. The mistake, now corrected, meant that they had actually passed the exam.
“This is every bar examiner’s worst nightmare,” said Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, in an interview with the World-Herald. “I’m feeling awful right along with them.”
The Nebraska State Bar Commission got the scores wrong for a total of 11 test takers, but for five of them the error didn’t affect whether they had passed or failed the exam, the story says. The error was spotted after two test takers questioned their failing scores. The problem: When scores were transferred to a spreadsheet, some essay scores were incorrectly matched with multiple choice scores.
Would-be lawyer Matt Aksamit, a Creighton law school graduate, was among three test takers who got the bad news on Wednesday. He is working as a law clerk for an Omaha company that had formally offered him a job as a lawyer Wednesday morning, before he learned of the mistake. He has to start paying on his law school loans in December.
“You just have to accept the fact that things happen in life and act accordingly,” Aksamit told the newspaper. “I’ve got to push this boulder,” he said, “back up the hill.”
