The Activist Guide to Passing the Bar Exam

You did it! Congratulations!

Just getting through the bar exam is a huge undertaking. Go out and celebrate!

Check out The Ed Doctor’s post on the importance of snacking during the bar exam to keep your energy levels up and mental focus on track.

Stop now. Your brain and body need to rest. They need time to absorb the material and get ready for two intense days of testing.

Stop looking at your outlines.

Don’t do any more practice questions.

Stop searching the internet for last minute tips and predictions.

Go outside. Have an ice cream cone. See a movie. Do something that forces you to get your mind off of the bar.

You’ve got this!!

It’s important to make a plan for exam day. You want to know when you have to wake up, how you’re getting to the test site, what you can bring to the test site, what you’ll eat, and how you’ll get home. You also want a plan for what you’ll be doing during each portion of the exam.

Stop by the test site before exam day so you don’t have any anxiety about getting lost. Make sure you give yourself plenty of extra time to deal with every day issues such as traffic and transportation delays. Make a back up plan in case your first transportation plan doesn’t work.

Thoroughly review the security policy for your jurisdiction so you know what you are permitted to bring in to the test facility, and what you are not permitted to bring in.

Map out a plan for your day.

If you’re taking the UBE on the east coast, your schedule will look like this:

Tuesday

9:30-12:30: 2 MPTs

2:00-5:00: 6 essays

Wednesday

9:30-12:30: 100 MBEs

2:00-5:00: 100 MBEs

(On the west coast, your MPTs will be in the afternoon and your essays in the morning.)

It is your responsibility to keep track of your timing, so know what time you should be at each point. At 90 minutes, move on to the second MPT (that’s 11am). Spend no more than 30 minutes on each essay. For the MBEs, you’ve got 1 minute and 48 seconds per question. That’s roughly 17 questions per half hour, 25 questions per 45 minutes, or 33 questions per hour.

Make a schedule for yourself and look at it every day. Memorize it. Write it out on scrap paper next to you as soon as the exam begins so that you can stay on track.

It’s also recommended that you bring your own lunch. Many test sites will offer meal services. However, if you bring something you 1) won’t have to wait on line and 2) can make sure the food won’t upset your stomach or make you sleepy.

Wherever you are taking the bar exam, dress in layers. The room will either be too hot or too cold. You want to make sure you are comfortable and not distracted by your body temperature.

Also make a plan for what to do if you don’t know something, or what to do if you start to panic. It’s impossible to know everything. There will be a sub-question of an essay that you don’t know. Practice making up a rule. Plan for it.

Also make a plan for what to do if stress and anxiety fill your head and make it difficult to focus. Will you get up and walk to the bathroom? Will you write out a mantra on scrap paper? Will you close your eyes and take three deep breaths before reading the next sentence? Have a plan so that you can move through your anxiety, instead of letting it move you.

I’ve heard from a lot of people in the past day or so who are very concerned because their practice MBE scores are going down. Unfortunately, this is very common. It does not mean that you are forgetting everything, or that you are going to fail the bar. It happens to plenty of people, and they go on to pass.

There are a number of potential reasons for this decline, but the important things to remember are 1) you’re in good company, and 2) you’re still going to pass the bar.

Keep pushing forward. Try switching the source of your MBE questions. Try focusing on essays. You want to see as many fact patterns as possible, so read through several essays every day, issue spot, and read the model answer. You can even copy down the model answer if that helps you learn.

Be active. Don’t just read and re-read your outlines. Talk, write, test yourself.

Keep going. You’re so close to the finish line!

 

You’ve got one week to go before exam day! This week should be about shoring up your memorization and seeing as many essay and MBE fact patterns as possible.

This week you can assess what you know and what you don’t know. You can decide which sub-topics to throw away because getting them will take too much time. Trust yourself during this time period. Only you know how you learn best – not your bar company, not your friends, not even me. If your gut is telling you to spend time memorizing, do it. If your gut is telling you that you need to do more practice, do it.

Don’t put too much stock in bar exam predictions. They’re right sometimes and wrong sometimes. The bar examiners work hard to be unpredictable. So, you can look at them, and make sure you know the areas of doctrine that they predict. But, be prepared for everything. Don’t just prepare for those subjects.

You’ve only got two weeks left. Don’t try to master everything in a subject before moving on. You’re better off seeing everything more times, than spending 3 days on contracts/sales and never getting to wills and family law. Move through the subjects quickly, practicing along the way. Follow the method of spaced retrieval. Here’s an article about it.

Most importantly, just keep going. You don’t have to know everything, and indeed it’s impossible to know everything. You will know most of it, and that will be enough.

First of all, don’t panic! Many people, if not most people, bomb the practice tests. It’s just practice. It’s not the real thing. It can be very valuable, if you stay in learning mode.

The key now is to learn as much as possible from the experience. Pay attention to which sub topics you struggled with. Notice when you answered several questions in a row incorrectly and see whether it was a lapse in focus, or if you let a difficult question break your confidence and infect the next several questions.

Make note of how you felt at different parts during the day. What distracted you? When did you get hungry or tired?

This score is not dispositive. Keep studying and stay focused on learning. Your score will improve significantly from now until exam day as you learn more, memorize more, and practice more. You’re not in exam mode until July 24-25.

To get the most out of your post-exam review, you may want to review your score and study strategy with the bar support folks at your school.