Nevada is now the first state to officially move its February Bar Exam back online as COVID-19 cases spike across the country.

Instead of a two (2) day, in person bar exam on February 22 and 23, bar examinees will now take a stripped down, remote 2 day test that does not include the 200-question Multistate Bar Exam, the State Bar of Nevada announced last week.

The Supreme Court of Nevada ordered the attorney licensing exam moved online due to concerns over current COVID conditions, according to a message on the State Bar’s website. Nevada has experience giving the bar exam online, as it did so in July 2020 and February 2021 before returning to in-person testing last summer.

Nevada’s upcoming exam will consist of seven (7) Nevada essay questions and two (2) Nevada performance tests. The state is allowing examinees a one-time deferral to July 2022 if they would prefer to take an in-person exam.

The big question now is whether other states will follow suit or remain firm in their insistence that they will be having only in person bar exams this February.

With the emergence of the Omicron variant, it is now statistically likely that you either have gotten COVID at some point already or know someone personally who has. Law schools have gone back to remote learning now to attempt to prevent the transmission of COVID, but so far no states besides Nevada have decided to go online again for the next bar exam.

The most likely explanation is that the remote exams of the last year proved somewhat of a disaster for bar examiners. The technical problems caused headaches for both exam takers and examiners in most states and it is unclear exactly how those issues would be fixed if another online exam were to occur.

Right now the New York Bar Exam is not limiting the exam to only vaccinated applicants, but is letting unvaccinated law graduates take it as long as they have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of the exam.

You have to wonder if that is good enough (especially since you cannot eat inside a bar or restaurant in NYC without proof of vaccination), or how a major incident that infects lots of exam takers (as well as anyone they then give it to, such as elderly or immunocompromised relatives) will reflect on the bar examiners. Probably not very well.

You can read more about this issue here.

In any case, whether it remains in person or ends up online again, there will be a bar examination this February. If you are sitting for the upcoming February Bar Exam and are having concerns about how your studying is going, we can certainly provide assistance to get you on track to pass before it’s too late. You can learn more about our famed bar exam tutoring program here.