New York Bar Association to would-be lawyers: No Macs Allowed

The software in question is (I believe) examsoft. My law school (University of Pennsylvania) also uses this software. We are allowed to take exams using boot camp and we have had no problems.

Something similar across the Hudson. In NJ, I tried the online renewal process for my wife's social worker license recently. Not only was the interface/usability absolutely horrible - bad site design - but it also required Internet Explorer on Windows. Managed to do it with my Parallels setup, but annoyed nonetheless.

I never understood these programs. Why go so far out of the way to limit the capabilities of the operating system itself? These apps are known to be highly unstable and are very prone to bugs. My university made use of these apps, but they were very quickly put out of use by the profs. They wound up spending more time helping people deal with issues than they should have been.

Here's an idea - make a bootable cd OS, hand it out at the beginning of the exam. Students boot into it and they are entered into a highly restricted linux computer with a super simple GUI. Give them access to Firefox and away we go!

...of course, Linux is notorious for poor wifi drivers. It may not work out so well :(

This really isn't such a big deal. For one thing, it's a statewide exam that is administered with a huge amount of lawyers involved. That means that things like liability are big concerns, and they have every right to have a controlled situation - this means that the IT staff doesn't need to know how to work with macs (most only know PCs).

Second, most people in the legal arena need to use PCs because they use Wordperfect. There's no Mac version.

Third, and I say this as a NYS employee who deals with a lot of lawyers (and I can't stress that enough), NY government does not hate Macs. I use two Mac Pros and a MacBook Pro, all supplied by the state, and the results my team gets are very satisfactory. This story is just about an exam given by and for people who are pros at finding loopholes, so they need very controlled environments.

This is interesting, at William and Mary in Va (where more than a couple people get law degrees) The trend is to go apple in the classroom, and not bootcamp either, apparently the biggest reason is startup times, many would be lawyers are walking around with fingers in between there screens and keyboard of there windows machines to keep them ready to go for the next class. since they don't always like to wake up in time to start taking notes. It's interesting to say the least and where lawyers go other will follow.

Some state bar exams support the Mac, and some don't, as the Bar Exam Software page at Mac Law Students illustrates: http://maclawstudents.com/blog/bar-exam-software/

As for law school exams, the trend has been decidedly in favor of Mac support in recent years. Three of the four exam software companies provide native Mac support, and ExamSoft's SofTest is authorized by ExamSoft to run with BootCamp: http://maclawstudents.com/blog/law-school-exam-software/

Let this be a reminder to every one that Government is glacially slow to adapt new technologies. Imagine if they controlled the internet or your healthcare.

We should kill all the lawyers anyway.

Law students who use Macs are pretty used to this. There are two popular types of exam software, one of which will run on a Mac and another that will only run on the newest MacBooks running Bootcamp. My school switched this year from the first to the second, and as a Powerbook user I'm certainly glad that I never took laptop exams. Other schools specifically require students to own a laptop and will not accept Macs. I turned down one very highly ranked school partly for this reason. The bottom line is that most Mac users know that being able to use their laptops for exams is a privilege that can very easily be taken away!

Just another sad case of ignorance. What is to support? You go to school and you can't buy your own choice of laptop now? This coming from a place who it educating people to defend our rights and freedoms. Sounds like a horrid place to go to school.....remind me to NEVER use any lawyers coming out of that place...