[blindlaw] very bad Braille on the July 2006 bar exam

[Elizabeth Akinola]

Hmm!  You'd think the same transcribers produced all Braille copies  of the 
MBE questions!  I had no problems on the MBE; the Braille was good; the 
binding  was of good quality and all the questions were rightly numbered.

I hope someone addresses the issues you've  raised.  The MBE questions were 
especially "tough" this year and I can't imagine having to deal with putting 
pages back in the binders while trying to answer those property law 
questions!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Shannon Ramsay" <sharamsay at stanfordalumni.org>
To: <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 6:08 PM
Subject: [blindlaw] very bad Braille on the July 2006 bar exam


Hello Everyone,

My name is Shannon and I am a 2005 graduate from U.C. Davis School of Law. I 
just took the California bar exam for the third time and I noticed something 
very strange this time around that I wanted to share with all of you. I take 
my exam using Braille test materials. During my first two bar exams, the 
Braille was really quite good other than a handful of minor typographical 
and editing errors. I think the Cal. bar must have selected a different 
transcriber this time around since the quality of my Braille texts has never 
been this poor.
>From the very beginning of the exam, I noticed an unacceptably high number 
of errors in my Braille essay and performance test test books. There were 
countless instances of misprints, misspelled words, words missing letters, 
words with extra letters, missing punctuation and capitilization, weird 
formatting, dashes in strange places, etc. The thought which went through my 
head as I continued to spot these many errors was that these documents were 
not proofread by anyone. All these flaws in my Braille materials did not 
really interfere with my ability to understand the questions which were 
presented to me; however, I found myself being forced to do a lot of 
time-consuming rereading of the text.
On the fifth and sixth days of my exam, the days when I took the 
multiple-choice section of the test (the MBE), my situation got even worse. 
I typically do a chunk of fifty questions before going to lunch and I finish 
the second set of fifty questions after lunch. On Saturday, July 29, the 
first fifty questions looked all right other than more of the same editing 
problems which I had seen before.
I resumed my exam with question 51 when I returned from lunch. At first, I 
thought my proctor had marked the wrong page in my book since I came across 
the numbers for questions 48, 49, and 50 again. I was somewhat perplexed 
since I had already completed these questions. I started flipping back and 
forth through the pages and talking to my proctor to figure out what was 
going on. At that point, I realized that question 48 had been printed twice. 
The second printing of 48 only contained the question stem and the answer 
choices. Question 50 had been reprinted four times. The number for question 
49 showed up twice. The two questions numbered 49 were two completely 
different questions.
My proctor and I documented these problems in an incident report and I went 
on to complete the remaining 50 questions. I still do not know which 
question 49 I was supposed to answer and I am concerned that the remaining 
questions were out of sync with the Scantron sheet.
On Sunday, I found yet more problems in the text of the MBE. The questions 
from 101 through 145 looked okay. I saw something very strange when I turned 
the page after completing question 145. There was a blank Braille page which 
only said 'go on to next page' at its top. As I looked at the facing page I 
noticed that the text began in the middle of a question which had no number. 
I tried to figure out what question this was. As I reviewed the pages around 
the blank page I realized that question 146 was nowhere at all in my Braille 
text and question 147 was incomplete. With the materials I had available to 
me, it would not have been possible for me to give answers to these two 
questions.
Together with my proctor I decided to stop the test at this point and to 
seek advice. The staff at my test center in Sacramento did not know how to 
handle this problem so they had to call Gayle Murphy who was apparently in 
L.A. to get directions. For the first time, my proctor was provided with the 
print test booklet for the bar. She was allowed to read me the two missing 
questions. Thirty minutes were wasted as the officials tried to get their 
instructions. I was given thirty minutes back on my clock. I do not feel 
that this was an adequate compensation for the damage this disruption caused 
to my focus and the high level of stress I experienced. As a result of this 
situation my final day of the bar was eight hours long instead of seven.
There is one more general problem I want to mention here. I found that the 
bindings of my Braille books were of very poor quality. If I bent the books 
in half to give myself more space on my desk or flipped pages back and forth 
a lot to find things the pages fell right out of the bindings. I ended up 
having to waste precious time reassembling my test materials.
I share my situation with you since I want to find out if there is anyone 
else out there who has had similar experiences with the California bar in 
recent years. I would really appreciate your advice/suggestions as to what I 
should do next. I have written letters to Gayle Murphy and the current 
president of the Cal. bar informing them about this situation and the 
problems were documented at the test center but I have not heard anything 
from anyone yet. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Shannon

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