Grandfathering Law Students Amid COVID-19 Bar Exam Changes
This paper examines the plight of eight women who enrolled in law school in 2019, only to have their legal education disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently complicated by a Mississippi Supreme Court ruling capping bar exam attempts at four. Having learned remotely during the pandemic and failed their first two bar attempts, these students now face a narrowing window of opportunity through no fault of their own. The paper argues that a grandfather clause should have protected students already enrolled when the new rule took effect, shielding them from retroactive policy changes. It also identifies broader systemic concerns including inadequate bar preparation, high education costs, and student debt burdens.
- Introduction: Eight Students and an Unprecedented Challenge: Eight law students face pandemic and bar exam hardship
- The Impact of COVID-19 on Legal Education: Remote learning disrupts legal education during COVID
- Bar Exam Failure and Its Emotional Toll: All eight students fail bar twice, suffer emotionally
- A Rule Change That Moved the Goalposts: Mississippi Supreme Court caps bar attempts mid-enrollment
- The Case for a Grandfather Clause: Grandfather clause proposed to protect enrolled students
- Broader Systemic Issues and Conclusion: Systemic failures in legal education exposed by crisis
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What makes this paper effective
- Opens with a compelling, humanizing narrative about eight real students, grounding the legal and policy argument in lived experience before pivoting to analysis.
- Builds emotional momentum progressively — moving from optimism to failure to fear — which mirrors the students' actual experience and keeps the reader invested in the argument.
- Connects individual hardship to a broader policy principle (the grandfather clause) cleanly and without overstating the evidence, maintaining credibility throughout.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates the effective use of a case study as an argumentative anchor. Rather than opening with abstract legal theory, the author grounds the policy claim in a specific, observable scenario and then extrapolates outward to systemic concerns. This case-to-principle structure is a strong model for persuasive legal and policy writing, showing how particular injustice motivates general reform.
Structure breakdown
The paper moves through six implicit stages: introducing the students and their context; describing the pandemic's disruption; narrating the emotional aftermath of failure; identifying the regulatory change as the core injustice; arguing for a grandfather clause as the remedy; and briefly gesturing toward wider systemic issues. Each stage builds on the last, with the policy argument emerging organically from the narrative rather than being imposed on it.
Introduction: Eight Students and an Unprecedented Challenge
In 2019, eight young women entered a law school eager and ambitious, ready to pursue careers in law — yet unaware of the surprises that lay ahead. The biggest surprise, of course, was the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced them into a wholly virtual learning environment — something none of them had anticipated or wanted. But they persevered in their studies and finished their law courses in 2022. Their resilience and optimism despite the daunting situation was admirable; they considered themselves successful in the face of such unprecedented challenges.
Yet, while these students were braving the new frontier of a pandemic-stricken world and forced into online learning, the Mississippi Supreme Court, in November 2021, decided to cap the number of attempts to pass the Mississippi bar exam at four — a sharp decrease from the previous unlimited attempts. This monumental change was not widely discussed or recognized at the time, perhaps due to the focus on the pandemic itself and on students adapting to online learning.
The Impact of COVID-19 on Legal Education
Despite these new regulations and the challenges of virtual learning, the eight women remained optimistic. As graduation loomed in May 2023, they undertook the hefty task of preparing for the bar exam. Some opted to take a preparatory course offered by their university at an additional cost of $1,000, adding to their already significant student debt. The institution, for its part, assured them that they were ready for the examination.
The shift to remote learning during the pandemic meant that these students did not receive the same educational experience as law students who had come before them. In-person instruction, courtroom simulations, and direct peer interaction — hallmarks of traditional legal education — were largely unavailable to them during critical years of their training. They adapted as best they could, but the limitations of online learning were real and consequential.
Bar Exam Failure and Its Emotional Toll
The students were shocked upon receiving their results: all eight of them had failed. Next to COVID-19 and the forced switch from campus-based to virtual learning, this was the third greatest shock of their lives. How could this have happened? Had their learning been insufficient the whole time? Had the university failed to prepare them adequately for the bar? All eight had received more or less the same educative experience, had gone through the same process, and had arrived at the same outcome: failure.
The stark reality of failure now bore down heavily on them. This was not a simple class test from which they could bounce back; it was the bar exam — the culmination of a years-long pursuit of a legal career. The failure was an enormous disappointment, steamrolling through the optimism and resilience they had held onto throughout their educational journey and the COVID-19 ordeal.
Embarrassment was an immediate response. After all, they had emerged from one of the finest institutions in the state. Yet here they were, all eight of them, unsuccessful in their first attempt. Their collective failure was a blow to the perception that they had been adequately prepared. Depression quickly set in, amplifying feelings of disappointment and embarrassment. They had placed immense pressure on themselves to succeed, believing that their hardships during the pandemic and their subsequent perseverance had mentally and emotionally toughened them for this crucial moment. When they failed, they questioned the investment they had made in their education.
Nonetheless, and despite the bleak circumstances, the students found solace in their shared experiences. They formed a support network, transforming their individual hardships into collective strength. They held regular meetings, provided emotional support to one another, and used their unique perspectives to brainstorm and share different study strategies.
They chose not to wallow in failure but to confront it head-on, turning it into a stepping stone toward success. Their resilience shone through as they threw themselves into preparations for a second attempt at the bar. Their shared experiences of failure, embarrassment, and depression, while painful, served as a strong motivational force. Despite their first unsuccessful attempt, their collective spirit and determination remained undeterred.
A few chose again to invest in the preparatory course offered by their institution, and in February 2023, they sat the exam once more. The results were identical: all eight failed again. This second failure was a crushing blow, made worse by the newly implemented limit on attempts. The students began to seriously question what was happening. All eight had received the same education, gone through the same experience, and were unable to pass the bar. Worse still, they were now left with only two more attempts, with the specter of unpayable student loan debt and unemployment looming over them.
They felt a new kind of fear and pressure unlike anything they had experienced before — worse, in its way, than COVID-19 itself. During the pandemic, everything had seemed strange and unreal, yet hope had remained because everyone anticipated that the situation was temporary and that things would soon return to normal.
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