John Molera thought the anxiety of taking the bar exam was over after he finished his test in late July. Then, a few hours later, he got an email from a classmate: One of the roughly 30 people sitting in the room with him for the past two days — where Mr. Molera recalled many people lifting masks for snacks and water breaks — had the coronavirus.
Mr. Molera, 25, is among roughly 70,000 recent law school graduates who take the bar each year, along with thousands of others who sit for licensing exams in social work, engineering, surgery and other fields, typically alongside hundreds of other students squeezed into crowded rooms at universities or testing centers.
Many of those exams were postponed and testing sites shut down in the spring as the coronavirus spread across the country, forcing recent graduates to delay the start of their careers.
Some tests moved online — often with scheduling problems and even computer glitches. Other states continued to offer them in person, raising concern about the possible spread of the virus at testing centers like the one where Mr. Molera took his exam at the University of Denver.