Alleged buggy software wrongly flunks wannabe lawyers from bar exam. What happened next won't shock you A California software company is being sued after its product mistakenly flunked more than 90 would-be attorneys taking their bar exam. The class-action lawsuit was filed in a Georgia state court against ILG Information Technologies of Mountain View, California. It seeks damages on behalf of the law students who were told they …
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Surely no respectable software company would have forgotten to add such a standard clause in its license?
"The wannabee lawyers would not have seen it, therefore they have fair grounds to sue."
I'm actually not too sure about that, though I don't want to pretend to know exactly how the law works in this manner. But it would be more logical for these students to sue the institute which held the exams. The software may have caused the mistake, but it was the institute itself which eventually didn't pass them. So it seems more logical to me to put the blame on the institution.
Dodgy on-line examination software is quite common in my experience. Recently did a vendor certification exam: 25 multiple-choice questions so my percentage score should be a multiple of 4, right? Nope.
Maybe some questions count for more than others (although they didn't say this)? Still nope - managed to score 62.04%. No idea how they got the .04%.
[Teacher icon, because]
"Maybe some questions count for more than others"
Correct, they often assign a different weight to certain subjects. I agree that it's not always transparent. But with the complexity in scoring, there is an increased risk of errors.
Makes me wonder whether the lawyers didn't just marginally pass the test and a small error (wrong weight assignment) made the score a fail instead of a pass. I wouldn't want to sue and have my name mentioned in the court documents in that case though ;)
Often there are different scores for each of the multiple choices, most points for the correct answer and lesser scores going from the least wrong to the most wrong (or even negative points for incorrect answers)
The problem is that the scoring system isn’t always explained
Since this is second time and different contractor, I'd be curious what the specs from the Bar showed. And any amendments to the specifications. Once is understandable, twice however, is not. There's a hole in the system in Georgia.
That's actually a good point. If the company can prove that the software conforms to the requirements specified by the customer, and that the customer signed off to say that it was OK, then they should be in the clear.
However this requires a clear documentation trail being kept by the company. In my experience, not many software houses are that careful.
"ILG's Electronic Bar Admission Solution is designed specifically for state bar admission offices and currently used by Illinois, Missouri and New Jersey bar admission offices and in implementation phase for Georgia Office of Bar Admissions."
I'm guessing they won't go much beyond the implementation phase there.
And they call themselves ILG Information Technologies, but their homepage is one giant Flash thing. So much for that credibility.
Consider the scenario where the Class Action was instigated using a lawyer who could potentially fall into that category. Would he/she need to withdraw on grounds of "conflict of interest"?
(Win the case and find out they might have been scored incorrectly themselves OR lose the case to hide a possible investigation of whether or not they passed the exams).
"There has been no problem with the software and services provided to the Georgia Board of Bar Examiners."
and:
"We have conducted a thorough investigation and have confirmed the causes of the errors in the scoring process," the Georgia Office of Bar Admissions said. "Those have been corrected and we are establishing procedures to ensure we will not make the same errors going forward."
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