The State Bar of California's decision July 27 to release the topics of the essay questions for the upcoming bar exam after an inadvertent leak to some law deans has caused quite a stir. But it's hardly the first time things have gone sideways when it comes to the bar exam. From lost tests and technology glitches to many a scoring mistake, the twice-annual attorney licensing exam is a perpetual breeding ground for flubs.

Still, the California release of the essay topics—the actual essay prompts remain under wraps, though the bar's disclosure has narrowed the possible topic list from 13 to seven—is an unusual situation in that it happened in the run up to the exam. Most bar exam glitches surface during the two-day test, or in the months afterward when exams are scored and results are released. The pre-test nature of the latest drama is an unusual twist. Here, we're taking a walk down memory lane and revisiting some of the most dramatic and gut-wrenching bar exam blunders of years past.

The case of the missing bar exams. It's not every day that the police get involved in a bar exam screw up. But in 1985, bar examiners in New York lost track of the electronically graded answers sheets—the Multistate Bar Exam—of some 542 people who took the July test that year. The answers sheets went missing from the Manhattan office of the State Board of Bar Examiners, and investigators were never able to determine conclusively whether they had been lost or stolen. So what happened to those effected test takers? Most of them had to retake the test. Ouch!

Barmageddon. The name ExamSoft will strike fear (or anxiety) in the hearts of many a young lawyer. You see, takers of the July 2014 bar exam in 43 states ran into technical problems when they tried to upload the answers to their essay questions—using software provided by ExamSoft Worldwide Inc. that blocked users from accessing the Internet or class note while using their laptops. The technical problems caused widespread delays on the exam, not to mention spikes in stress as test takers waited to upload their answers. The incident was quickly dubbed “Barmageddon.” In the end, ExamSoft agreed to a $2.1 million settlement after test takers filed multiple class-action lawsuits.

You failed—JK! Pity the 90 Georgia law grads who for six months or more erroneously believed they had failed the bar exam. Turns out the Georgia Board of Bar Examiners made mistakes when it recalculated the scores of exams in which the essay questions had been regraded for both the July 2015 and the February 2016 tests. It didn't discover the mistakes until August of 2016, however. In the meantime, 45 test takers from both administrations had incorrectly been told they failed when they actually passed. The head of the bar examiners personally called each impacted test taker to deliver the news.

You passed—JK! On the other side of the coin, a scoring error caused officials in New Jersey to incorrectly inform 13 people who took the February 1999 bar exam that they had passed. In reality, scores from a national property law essay question were improperly entered into the slot for the state-specific property law question, altering the scores of 83 people. Of those, 16 candidates saw a change in their overall status—three went from failing to passing, while 13 went from passing to failing. Bar authorities didn't discover the mistake until May of that year.

Something smells fishy. Tongues were wagging in the Palmetto State in 2007 when the South Carolina Supreme Court opted to drop the results from the wills, trusts and estates portion of the July bar exam—a move that allowed 20 people to go from failing to passing. The decision came about after a mistake was discovered in the score of that section for one test taker who was initially told they passed but who actually failed. Instead of revoking that passage, the court decided to nullify the results of that section for all those who had failed out of fairness, meaning 20 more people passed. That probably would have been the end of the matter, but for the fact that the daughters of a circuit judge and the chair of the state house's judiciary committee both benefited from the revision, leading to speculation of political favors.

A half-and-half gaffe. Yes, we've got yet another tale of problems in the reporting of who passed and who failed, this time in Washington, D.C., for the July 2018 bar exam. In this case, it wasn't a problem with the actual scoring of the exam. Rather, a clerical error resulted in numerous inaccuracies on the initial list of passing candidates released that November. That list came out on a Friday. By Tuesday, D.C.'s Committee on Admissions was informing some candidates of mistakes. It was a bit of a wash overall: Thirteen were initially told they passed when they had actually failed, while 12 who thought they failed learned they actually had passed.