ProfessorTommy.Tips

January 15 is National Hat Day. It's a fun excuse to break out your favorite cap, beanie, fedora, or “good luck” hamburger hat. But on bar exam day, headgear is one of those “seems harmless, becomes a problem” items. Here’s the big picture: State boards of bar examiners' and the National Conference of Bar Examiners' NCBE test-day policies generally require your head (and often ears) to be uncovered for exam security. And many jurisdictions expressly prohibit hats/caps/hoods i

For years, the Uniform Bar Examination portability pitch was simple: take the exam in one UBE jurisdiction place, transfer an eligible score to another UBE jurisdiction. The NextGen UBE transition is turning that simple idea into a more complicated planning problem, especially during the July 2026 through February 2028 window when some jurisdictions will be administering the NextGen UBE and others will still be offering the Legacy UBE. Recently, the landscape has started to c

Mike Tomlin is the longtime head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers , and he’s famous for delivering short, memorable one-liners in press conferences. (Steelers fans call them “ Tomlinisms .”) After the Steelers and Ravens played a chaotic, down-to-the-wire game that ended on a missed last-second field goal that sent the Steelers into the playoffs and ended the Ravens' season, a reporter asked Tomlin to put into words how razor-thin the margin was between season over and kee

I was scrolling today and saw a CNN Underscored headline about down jackets. It was clearly supposed to say something like, "We tested 13 down jackets to find the warmest winners." But the headline said "warmest winers." Source: www.cnn.com Yes, I know what they meant. Winner . Not winer . Still, that one missing letter changed how I read the entire piece. Because here’s what immediately happened in my brain: If something as simple as a headline wasn’t proofread, what else in

As we say farewell to 2025, let's take a look at the Top 10 most visited blog posts over the past year: 1. Early Signals from July 2025 Bar Exam Results (Sept. 9, 2025) Excerpt: “The National Conference of Bar Examiners has begun releasing first-time bar passage rates for jurisdictions that have reported July 2025 results, and the early numbers provide an interesting—if incomplete—snapshot. We now have data from seven jurisdictions, and the picture is ... mixed .” 2. Moonw