15 ms·

You can‘t take the Bar exam if your laptop is too modern

206 points by omnibrain 4y ago

McNutty 4y ago
Does anyone know if this same issue is present in the PearsonVue software?
matt321 4y ago
Abolish the bar? Wut? Why? Because its hard?
- Karsteski 4y ago
  Something something gatekeeping by old people
- srndsnd 4y ago
  I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law. Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks. I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.
  - coding123 4y ago
    I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents). As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay. The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.
      - coding123 4y ago
        As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me. Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness? Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?
        barneygale 4y ago
        Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders
        HWR_14 4y ago
        > Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks. I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam. Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties. I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned". IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.
      - watwut 4y ago
        If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.
        autoexec 4y ago
        Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways. From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others. It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams. As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.
  - Maultasche 4y ago
    I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer. He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books. He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor. It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well. Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it. Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.
- riskable 4y ago
  To be fair, the Bar exists because lawyers themselves felt there were too many lawyers.
- xtracto 4y ago
  What should be abolished is those crappy proctoring applications. Either implement remote-friendly tests or do as TOEFL has done since decades and apply tests at controlled locations.
- rhino369 4y ago
  The bar exam weeds people out at the wrong point--after they've racked up 300k in loans. They should just set a minimum LSAT score to achieve the same purpose. Or better yet, make a JD a Bachelor of Law degree without weeding out.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    But then how do you weed people out?
    - rhino369 4y ago
      Let the market decide. Nobody is going to hire someone with shit grades from a lowly ranked school. But instead of having 300k in debt, those unemployable Bachelor of Law grads will be no worse off than if they had a BA in an unmarketable field like sociology or poli-sci. Right now, they have to go get the the BA in anything (most do stuff like poli-sci) AND then they have to go spend 3 years and 300k dollars on a professional degree. The glut of lawyers isn't really a problem without all that wasted time and debt.
- t_mann 4y ago
  Requirements like the bar exam exist also to protect the insiders who also happen to make the rules. In economics it's called an insider-outsider problem. Not saying we should actually abolish the bar, just hinting at a possible reasonable argument.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    also called regulatory capture
    - t_mann 4y ago
      I'd say that's something different. Regulatory capture is when a regulator who is supposed to be outside the system gets drawn into it (like a banking regulator who gets defensive about a flawed risk model by a bank after they've given their approval). Bar associations are by definition run by people who are part of the system.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
josephcsible 4y ago
I hope someone in the community releases an unofficial patch to make it work on 12th Gen CPUs, that just happens to make it work on actual VMs too.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I bet if you disable the e cores it would work. Worth a try
  - rootw0rm 4y ago
    i'll do it if somebody can provide me a copy of the software
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
borissk 4y ago
Just buy a Ryzen laptop. Intel's 12th Gen has had a number of issues - hardware acceleration in browsers not working, problems with thread scheduling under any OS except from Windows 11, excessive power consumption and overheating in benchmarks. On top of that Intel has done a lot of illegal stuff to protect their market positions.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  I think you miss the whole point of why this landed on HN. Why would somebody need to buy another laptop just to be able to attend the exam?
  - borissk 4y ago
    Because buying a laptop running a drastically new architecture increases the chances you'll run into software issues. This exam app is not the only thing Intel has broken.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - reiichiroh 4y ago
      “Why doesn’t this work on my Linux laptop?”
- kotaKat 4y ago
  Meanwhile, as a Ryzen user, half of my virtual machines won't work and crash, USB is flakier than a biscuit in the Sahara, and my OEM refuses to release AGESA updates and I can't update the AGESA myself to fix literally dozens of problems on Ryzen. "Just!" buying new hardware isn't a solution.
  - borissk 4y ago
bambax 4y ago
What's wrong with pen and paper.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper. Only part of the exam is an essay exam, but modern law is going to be practiced on a computer, and it makes sense for the test to be administered on a computer. (if only they could get away from ExamSoft...)
  - humanistbot 4y ago
    > It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper. It is taking everything in me not to make a full-on "kids these days" rant.
    - mcculley 4y ago
      In order to make it fair, you would have to hobble every test taker to use pen and paper. I remember writing essay answers with pen and paper and also with a typewriter and using Wite-Out. I would not want to compete using those tools against someone who is able to edit their answers before submitting them.
    - post_break 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      If it makes you feel better, in my modern western country, all exams are still done with pen and paper. It pretty much only has advantages: easier to proctor, less issue with cheating, less technical problems, everyone is taking the test in the same condition. The idea that you could just come out of school and not be able to write a dozen pages without feeling pain feels weird to me.
      - demopathos 4y ago
pram 4y ago
I don’t have a strong opinion personally, but my wife is a lawyer and I remember her cramming all the BARBRI material in the weeks before her Bar exam. She said she basically could have skipped law school and done just that stuff (and saved hundreds of thousands of $$$ lol)
- iasay 4y ago
  That’s how I did the AWS solution architect exams. Except it was hours not weeks before :) I spent the training course week on holiday.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Not gonna lie... if I could switch from my dev role to an AWS solution architect role just by passing some tests... I probably would. Maybe I'm just getting crankier, but there's a ton of obvious things that multiple levels of management are not seeing until I bring it up, and I don't really want to get an MBA.
- mwint 4y ago
  What’s the disadvantage to skipping law school (other than resume issues, I assume)? Could one actually do this and come out a “real” lawyer?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the primary value of law school is signaling, but it’s a big one. You could skip law school in California and take the Baby Bar and become a “real lawyer” in the sense you could legally do everything any other lawyer can do. But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality. E.g. in the recent leaked conversation between Macron and Putin: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exchange-between-putin-macron/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exch... > Putin quickly turned the conversation to “our dear colleague Mr. Zelensky,” accusing the Ukrainian president of “lying” to Macron about his intention to implement the Minsk Accords, which had sought to end the war in the Donbas region. > Putin then took issue with Zelensky’s apparent refusal to negotiate with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian separatists, which infuriated the French president and prompted him to exclaim in audible frustration: “I don’t know where your lawyer learned law!”
junar 4y ago
I wonder if disabling the Alder Lake E-cores could work around the problem. Certain games had DRM issues which could be resolved this way. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-releases-tool-to-disable-E-cores-on-Alder-Lake-processors.580688.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-releases-tool-to-disa...
- bigp3t3 4y ago
  Another stake in the DRM coffin. /I wish.
D13Fd 4y ago
Examsoft sucks. They are a horrible pain to deal with, they are entrenched in their market, and they have no fear of imposing ridiculous requirements on their users (e.g. bar exam takers) because their users aren't their customers. Their customers are the jurisdictions that administer the bar. So yeah. I agree it sucks but there is not much to do about it as an exam taker.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  I'm so glad I'm out of school and I don't have to worry about this kind of stuff. I feel for students today.
drc500free 4y ago
State Bars are so technically illiterate that they don't know the basics of how to procure technology. California Bar has no CTO and didn't know to require an SLA of ExamSoft. When ExamSoft blames the users for their buggy software, the Bar actually believes them.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  maybe if we had actually dug into open standards instead of this mushy cesspool of abandonware, not everyone in the world would have to spend their time tracking technology trends
  - rattlesnakedave 4y ago
    Who is “we” here?
    - convolvatron 4y ago
      technologists. computer people. computer companies. the people responsible for this mess.
      - nexuist 4y ago
        Or maybe blame the California Bar for partnering with such amateur vendors when they had millions of competent technology companies to pick from?
  - simonh 4y ago
    While I'm all for open standards, the fact is they're no magic wand. It's just as possible for an open system to be clunky, outdated and abandoned. Just because it's possible for someone to work on it or fix issues, that's no guarantee anyone will. The problem here was poor consideration of requirements and inadequate governance, and there's really no substitute for just flat out doing a better job at those. After all, nobody is stopping someone developing an open suite of exam software, it's not against the law or anything. It's all very well saying that's what we need, but somebody has to actually buckle down and do it.
rcurry 4y ago
My all time favorite was when I took the SAT (long time ago) and the proctor confiscated my calculator. At the end of the test there was a final question: “Which of the following approved calculators did you use on this test?” My calculator was option B.
- copperx 4y ago
  Did you complain? Sue?
  - account-5 4y ago
    I genuinely thought you were calling the OP Sue, went searching to see if Sue was the new Karen, couldn't find anything, came back and realised you meant sue them... FML.
    - copperx 4y ago
      Wouldn't that be "Did you complain, Sue?"?
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        It's the same thing both ways! Chalk up another win for English.
        sirsinsalot 4y ago
        Not quite the same: "Didn't you complain, Sue?" - A question to Sue "Didn't you compain? Sue?" - A question to Sue who is inattentive
        bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        But not Sue, did you complain?
    - Orlan 4y ago
      Surely you weren’t the only one who read it that way.
more_corn 4y ago
Missing part of headline “and your state bar uses Examsoft” That is not the only option your state bar could have chosen.
golemotron 4y ago
To be fair, if lawyers use and become familiar with up-to-date technology, the whole system breaks down. Our economy depends upon a lag between technological development and regulation.
charcircuit 4y ago
You can't take a math exam if your calculator is too modern.
- thih9 4y ago
  Not sure if modern is the right word here; I guess graphing calculators from the 90s would also not be allowed. Unless you mean something different?
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Most exams only allow a small number of calculators. Something like Wolfram Alpha is not allowed. Exams want to limit you to a fixed set of built in functionality as to opposed to using the best tools that are available to you.
alx__ 4y ago
No idea how the Bar exam works. Sounds like no notes or anything? Why they would need to have a CPU check? Does the software have some anti-cheating mechanism?
wtallis 4y ago
If the incompatibility is specifically with Intel's 12th gen platform, then it probably stems from the mix of P and E cores having different CPUID data, which has also been a problem for some video games with aggressive DRM/anti-cheat measures. But it also wouldn't surprise me if the incompatibility has been misidentified and actually stems from 12th gen systems being the most common occurrences of machines that ship with Windows 11, with the core isolation and memory integrity features on by default. Those actually make use of hardware virtualization features: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-protection-in-windows-security-afa11526-de57-b1c5-599f-3a4c6a61c5e2 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-protectio...

206 points by omnibrain 4y ago

McNutty 4y ago

Does anyone know if this same issue is present in the PearsonVue software?

matt321 4y ago

Abolish the bar? Wut? Why? Because its hard?

Karsteski 4y ago
Something something gatekeeping by old people
srndsnd 4y ago
I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law. Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks. I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.
- coding123 4y ago
  I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents). As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay. The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.
    - coding123 4y ago
      As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me. Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness? Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?
      - barneygale 4y ago
        Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders
        HWR_14 4y ago
        > Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks. I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam. Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties. I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned". IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.
    - watwut 4y ago
      If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways. From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others. It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams. As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.
- Maultasche 4y ago
  I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer. He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books. He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- D13Fd 4y ago
  What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor. It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well. Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it. Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.
riskable 4y ago
To be fair, the Bar exists because lawyers themselves felt there were too many lawyers.
xtracto 4y ago
What should be abolished is those crappy proctoring applications. Either implement remote-friendly tests or do as TOEFL has done since decades and apply tests at controlled locations.
rhino369 4y ago
The bar exam weeds people out at the wrong point--after they've racked up 300k in loans. They should just set a minimum LSAT score to achieve the same purpose. Or better yet, make a JD a Bachelor of Law degree without weeding out.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  But then how do you weed people out?
  - rhino369 4y ago
    Let the market decide. Nobody is going to hire someone with shit grades from a lowly ranked school. But instead of having 300k in debt, those unemployable Bachelor of Law grads will be no worse off than if they had a BA in an unmarketable field like sociology or poli-sci. Right now, they have to go get the the BA in anything (most do stuff like poli-sci) AND then they have to go spend 3 years and 300k dollars on a professional degree. The glut of lawyers isn't really a problem without all that wasted time and debt.
t_mann 4y ago
Requirements like the bar exam exist also to protect the insiders who also happen to make the rules. In economics it's called an insider-outsider problem. Not saying we should actually abolish the bar, just hinting at a possible reasonable argument.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  also called regulatory capture
  - t_mann 4y ago
    I'd say that's something different. Regulatory capture is when a regulator who is supposed to be outside the system gets drawn into it (like a banking regulator who gets defensive about a flawed risk model by a bank after they've given their approval). Bar associations are by definition run by people who are part of the system.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

josephcsible 4y ago

I hope someone in the community releases an unofficial patch to make it work on 12th Gen CPUs, that just happens to make it work on actual VMs too.

flatiron 4y ago
I bet if you disable the e cores it would work. Worth a try
- rootw0rm 4y ago
  i'll do it if somebody can provide me a copy of the software

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

borissk 4y ago

Just buy a Ryzen laptop. Intel's 12th Gen has had a number of issues - hardware acceleration in browsers not working, problems with thread scheduling under any OS except from Windows 11, excessive power consumption and overheating in benchmarks. On top of that Intel has done a lot of illegal stuff to protect their market positions.

twawaaay 4y ago
I think you miss the whole point of why this landed on HN. Why would somebody need to buy another laptop just to be able to attend the exam?
- borissk 4y ago
  Because buying a laptop running a drastically new architecture increases the chances you'll run into software issues. This exam app is not the only thing Intel has broken.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - reiichiroh 4y ago
    “Why doesn’t this work on my Linux laptop?”
kotaKat 4y ago
Meanwhile, as a Ryzen user, half of my virtual machines won't work and crash, USB is flakier than a biscuit in the Sahara, and my OEM refuses to release AGESA updates and I can't update the AGESA myself to fix literally dozens of problems on Ryzen. "Just!" buying new hardware isn't a solution.
- borissk 4y ago

bambax 4y ago

What's wrong with pen and paper.

D13Fd 4y ago
It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper. Only part of the exam is an essay exam, but modern law is going to be practiced on a computer, and it makes sense for the test to be administered on a computer. (if only they could get away from ExamSoft...)
- humanistbot 4y ago
  > It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper. It is taking everything in me not to make a full-on "kids these days" rant.
  - mcculley 4y ago
    In order to make it fair, you would have to hobble every test taker to use pen and paper. I remember writing essay answers with pen and paper and also with a typewriter and using Wite-Out. I would not want to compete using those tools against someone who is able to edit their answers before submitting them.
  - post_break 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    If it makes you feel better, in my modern western country, all exams are still done with pen and paper. It pretty much only has advantages: easier to proctor, less issue with cheating, less technical problems, everyone is taking the test in the same condition. The idea that you could just come out of school and not be able to write a dozen pages without feeling pain feels weird to me.
    - demopathos 4y ago

pram 4y ago

I don’t have a strong opinion personally, but my wife is a lawyer and I remember her cramming all the BARBRI material in the weeks before her Bar exam. She said she basically could have skipped law school and done just that stuff (and saved hundreds of thousands of $$$ lol)

iasay 4y ago
That’s how I did the AWS solution architect exams. Except it was hours not weeks before :) I spent the training course week on holiday.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Not gonna lie... if I could switch from my dev role to an AWS solution architect role just by passing some tests... I probably would. Maybe I'm just getting crankier, but there's a ton of obvious things that multiple levels of management are not seeing until I bring it up, and I don't really want to get an MBA.
mwint 4y ago
What’s the disadvantage to skipping law school (other than resume issues, I assume)? Could one actually do this and come out a “real” lawyer?
- rayiner 4y ago
  Unfortunately, the primary value of law school is signaling, but it’s a big one. You could skip law school in California and take the Baby Bar and become a “real lawyer” in the sense you could legally do everything any other lawyer can do. But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality. E.g. in the recent leaked conversation between Macron and Putin: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exchange-between-putin-macron/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exch... > Putin quickly turned the conversation to “our dear colleague Mr. Zelensky,” accusing the Ukrainian president of “lying” to Macron about his intention to implement the Minsk Accords, which had sought to end the war in the Donbas region. > Putin then took issue with Zelensky’s apparent refusal to negotiate with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian separatists, which infuriated the French president and prompted him to exclaim in audible frustration: “I don’t know where your lawyer learned law!”

junar 4y ago

I wonder if disabling the Alder Lake E-cores could work around the problem. Certain games had DRM issues which could be resolved this way. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-releases-tool-to-disable-E-cores-on-Alder-Lake-processors.580688.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-releases-tool-to-disa...

bigp3t3 4y ago
Another stake in the DRM coffin. /I wish.

D13Fd 4y ago

Examsoft sucks. They are a horrible pain to deal with, they are entrenched in their market, and they have no fear of imposing ridiculous requirements on their users (e.g. bar exam takers) because their users aren't their customers. Their customers are the jurisdictions that administer the bar. So yeah. I agree it sucks but there is not much to do about it as an exam taker.

wollsmoth 4y ago
I'm so glad I'm out of school and I don't have to worry about this kind of stuff. I feel for students today.

drc500free 4y ago

State Bars are so technically illiterate that they don't know the basics of how to procure technology. California Bar has no CTO and didn't know to require an SLA of ExamSoft. When ExamSoft blames the users for their buggy software, the Bar actually believes them.

convolvatron 4y ago
maybe if we had actually dug into open standards instead of this mushy cesspool of abandonware, not everyone in the world would have to spend their time tracking technology trends
- rattlesnakedave 4y ago
  Who is “we” here?
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    technologists. computer people. computer companies. the people responsible for this mess.
    - nexuist 4y ago
      Or maybe blame the California Bar for partnering with such amateur vendors when they had millions of competent technology companies to pick from?
- simonh 4y ago
  While I'm all for open standards, the fact is they're no magic wand. It's just as possible for an open system to be clunky, outdated and abandoned. Just because it's possible for someone to work on it or fix issues, that's no guarantee anyone will. The problem here was poor consideration of requirements and inadequate governance, and there's really no substitute for just flat out doing a better job at those. After all, nobody is stopping someone developing an open suite of exam software, it's not against the law or anything. It's all very well saying that's what we need, but somebody has to actually buckle down and do it.

rcurry 4y ago

My all time favorite was when I took the SAT (long time ago) and the proctor confiscated my calculator. At the end of the test there was a final question: “Which of the following approved calculators did you use on this test?” My calculator was option B.

copperx 4y ago
Did you complain? Sue?
- account-5 4y ago
  I genuinely thought you were calling the OP Sue, went searching to see if Sue was the new Karen, couldn't find anything, came back and realised you meant sue them... FML.
  - copperx 4y ago
    Wouldn't that be "Did you complain, Sue?"?
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      It's the same thing both ways! Chalk up another win for English.
      - sirsinsalot 4y ago
        Not quite the same: "Didn't you complain, Sue?" - A question to Sue "Didn't you compain? Sue?" - A question to Sue who is inattentive
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        But not Sue, did you complain?
  - Orlan 4y ago
    Surely you weren’t the only one who read it that way.

more_corn 4y ago

Missing part of headline “and your state bar uses Examsoft” That is not the only option your state bar could have chosen.

golemotron 4y ago

To be fair, if lawyers use and become familiar with up-to-date technology, the whole system breaks down. Our economy depends upon a lag between technological development and regulation.

charcircuit 4y ago

You can't take a math exam if your calculator is too modern.

thih9 4y ago
Not sure if modern is the right word here; I guess graphing calculators from the 90s would also not be allowed. Unless you mean something different?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Most exams only allow a small number of calculators. Something like Wolfram Alpha is not allowed. Exams want to limit you to a fixed set of built in functionality as to opposed to using the best tools that are available to you.

alx__ 4y ago

No idea how the Bar exam works. Sounds like no notes or anything? Why they would need to have a CPU check? Does the software have some anti-cheating mechanism?

wtallis 4y ago

If the incompatibility is specifically with Intel's 12th gen platform, then it probably stems from the mix of P and E cores having different CPUID data, which has also been a problem for some video games with aggressive DRM/anti-cheat measures. But it also wouldn't surprise me if the incompatibility has been misidentified and actually stems from 12th gen systems being the most common occurrences of machines that ship with Windows 11, with the core isolation and memory integrity features on by default. Those actually make use of hardware virtualization features: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-protection-in-windows-security-afa11526-de57-b1c5-599f-3a4c6a61c5e2 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-protectio...