The Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners has ended its policy requiring exam takers to seek permission first if they have headwear for religious or medical reasons.
The new policy, which the Board of Bar Examiners instituted on Aug. 16, still prohibits exam takers from wearing baseball caps and other hats that are not medically or religiously necessary.
The change comes as a result of an incident during the Aug. 1 bar exam in which a proctor passed a note to a woman wearing a hijab, informing her that she must remove for the exam’s afternoon session because she did not have permission to wear it. The woman - identified as Iman Abdulrazzak in legal blog Above the Law -- had permission, but the proctor was unaware of this, said Marilyn Wellington, the executive director of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners.
Abdulrazzak was taking the exam at Western New England University in Springfield with about 300 other exam-takers. Wellington wrote a letter to Abdulrazzak and apologized for what happened, Wellington said.
“It was a very regrettable incident,” Wellington said in an interview. The policy was never intended to prevent head wear that has a medical or religious purpose, she said, so the decision to change the policy was an easy one to make.
Wellington would not comment on what happened to the proctor, calling it a personnel decision.