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3L here.

Prepping for my bar exam and I'm sure all of you who have been here are stressed as well. I'm an older student (late 30s) and so I have more life trauma to document than most, but I've mostly got this under control. But, here's my question to start a discussion:

Recently my mom passed away and while going through her stuff, I found a seat belt ticket issued to me in 2001. So I added it to my law school file with no big issue. But then it made me think, I should personally check every single item on the application so that nothing would be missed or left to chance. So far, so good.

Today I got to the question about debt and student loans. I ran my credit report and all is good there. Other than student loans, I only have $1800 in credit card debt I am paying down at 0% APR, so still all good. Finally, I still received my financial aid this semester from my school, so other than just knowing I've always made my payments, obviously I'm in good standing with student loans.

So, two questions:

1. How can I confirm this officially? And
2. How do bar examiners check on student loan defaults?

Thanks in advance.

1. Call the police that issued the citation, ask them if they have any records.
2. Credit check.

Empedocles1 wrote:3L here...

You can call for the citation. You should however be able to find the citation online via the website for jurisdiction’s court. You may be able to use just your name to find it. Just add screenshots to your application (if you can submit online) or print it out as an attachment (if you have to submit via paper). It shows the offense, the disposition, and current status, pretty much takings care of that portion.

Everything’s tied to your social security number. You give that number with your C&F application. Student loan defaults eventually get reported. That’s how anyone really can investigate you.

My $.02

Student loan defaults definitely get reported- I found out that I had defaulted on 2 groupings of student loans. I was paying the other groups, but was unaware of these ones for some complicated reasons, and ended up defaulting. However, I passed C&F without even a question about them.

FWIW, I did pull my full credit report a few months ago and noticed a hard pull from the Board of Law Examiners, so they definitely look at everything.

kms181 wrote:FWIW, I did pull my full credit report a few months ago and noticed a hard pull from the Board of Law Examiners, so they definitely look at everything.

The pull itself should appear on the credit report, but it shouldn't be a hard pull. A hard pull means you were applying for credit, and will negatively impact your credit score.

albanach wrote:

kms181 wrote:FWIW, I did pull my full credit report a few months ago and noticed a hard pull from the Board of Law Examiners, so they definitely look at everything.

The pull itself should appear on the credit report, but it shouldn't be a hard pull. A hard pull means you were applying for credit, and will negatively impact your credit score.

True. But sometimes places don't know what they're doing, and do it wrong. I've had that happen to be me where a place I did volunteer work hard-pulled me during the credit check. Didn't say anything to them because it wasn't ruffling feathers, but I subscribed to Credit Karma and noticed it