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Law360 (July 30, 2020, 10:59 PM EDT) -- A "small number" of test scores from the Law School Admission Test administered this month have disappeared due to a technical glitch that affected the online exam, the group behind the test said Thursday.
Law School Admission Council spokesperson Mark Murray told Law360 on Thursday that "a little less than 1%" of the 14,500 July test-takers — roughly 120 people — had been affected by the issue.
"We are continuing to work to try to recover the answers from the test-takers in that 1% and we're having some success," Murray said. "That number keeps going down as we're able to recover the data."
The exam, known as LSAT-Flex, was conducted entirely remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. Anyone who had been signed up for the in-person July LSAT was automatically registered for this month's LSAT-Flex test, according to the LSAC's announcement of the online exam.
Murray said that only the July exam was affected and that the LSAC was taking steps to prevent a repeat of the incident.
"We have already identified what happened and we have fixed the platform so that it cannot happen again in the future," he said.
Murray added that the organization is "very sorry" for the distress the glitch has caused.
"We are contacting all of the affected test-takers by phone and by email to apologize directly to them and provide them with support and outline their options," he said.
The LSAC said in a separate statement provided to Law360 that it would give those affected an opportunity to retake the test next week free of charge, with a promise to get the test-takers their scores within a week or less. The statement also indicated the organization would provide a refund of their July registration fee and four free law school reports.
The July LSAC test-takers aren't the only would-be lawyers who recently faced technical problems, which have become more commonplace as more aspects of the legal profession move online amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this week, Michigan's online bar exam, the first such test to go forward so far, experienced a cyberattack that caused a serious technical problem, as test-takers were initially unable to log in for the second part of the exam.
Aspiring attorneys took to social media Tuesday to say that the password to log in to the second of five modules — which was supposed to be available on the website of ExamSoft five minutes before the test was set to begin — was not available. ExamSoft's support line began giving out the passwords to callers, and the issue was eventually resolved by emailing the passwords to test-takers, according to the Michigan Supreme Court.
--Additional reporting by Emma Cueto. Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
