The Activist Guide to Passing the Bar Exam

It’s February! That means you have about 3.5 weeks left. Seeing the word February on your calendar can create anxiety, but it doesn’t need to. You are almost done, and that should bring some sense of relief.

You should pivot shortly to memorization and practice mode (from learning, creating materials, and practice mode). You may be worried about finding time to do more than you have already been doing. If you’ve been studying 10 hours a day, there is no time in the day to ramp up. That’s ok. The truth is that you don’t necessarily need to spend more time. You won’t be spending time watching lectures or making study materials.

If you haven’t put in the time, however, you really have no time to lose. You need to step up your game immediately. Make sure that you are doing some form of practice every single day – MBEs, essays, or MPTs. Ideally, you’ll do more than one type of practice every day because you don’t have as solid of a foundation of practice as you would like to have.

You also want to make sure you have a solid plan for what you will use to memorize. If you haven’t been making study materials, make sure that what you have from your bar review company, or the materials that were passed down from a friend, will actually work for you.

Make no mistake, February is intense. Whether you’ve been on top of your game or not, it is natural to feel more pressure in February. But remember that you are only human and there is only so much that is humanly possible to do. You still need to take breaks. You still need to eat well, exercise, sleep, and have some fun.

You’re almost at the finish line! The light at the end of this tunnel should provide you with the motivation you need to get through the final weeks!

Don’t get lost in the daily grind of just going through the motions to check things off of your bar company’s to do list. Make sure you take the time to reflect on each task after you have done it. It’s not enough to say “oh, I got that wrong, I don’t understand mortgages at all.”

You want to dive a bit deeper. Ask yourself why you got a question wrong. Was it because you didn’t know the doctrine? Ok, what are you going to do to make sure you learn the doctrine? Did you put that rule into your outline, or on a flashcard?

But chances are, you’re also getting questions wrong for test-taking reasons, not doctrinal reasons. Pay attention to those reasons too. Look for patterns, such as reading the question too quickly and missing something key, or reading too slowly and over-analyzing or adding something in that isn’t there.

Every day you should think of 2-3 takeaways – general lessons that you learned and will take forward to the rest of bar prep. Think globally, beyond each individual question. Use those takeaways to change how you approach future questions. Reflection is how we grow.

Many of you will have a practice MBE coming up soon (or it may have already been scheduled). You may decide to skip it because you don’t feel ready. Don’t. It’s a good idea to do it.

Take the practice MBE to practice the MBE. Don’t take it to determine how you will do on exam day. You haven’t memorized everything yet. This isn’t the test.

But it is still a valuable experience. It’s important to feel what it’s like to do 100 questions and have to do 100 more. It’s important to take away some lessons about test-taking and stamina. Pay attention to how you feel and how focused you are at various points during the exam. Notice when you are distracted, tired, anxious. Notice your timing as you move through the exam at various parts in the day.

When you review your answers, notice when you answer several incorrectly in a row. Was that because one question was difficult and it blew your concentration for the next several questions? Was it because you were tired or hungry and you need to build in a snack, drink of water, or quick trip to the restroom to reset your focus?

Remember that if you get anxious, you can close your eyes, take 3-5 deep breaths, and reset. It will only take a few seconds and can save you a lot of wasted time and mental energy.

Also pay attention to specific topics and subtopics that you struggle with. That can help you figure out what to prioritize in the last couple of weeks, and what you might need to let go of.

If your bar review company rents out a space for the exam, go to it. It’s important to be around other people and distractions in order to simulate exam day.

Remember, even though it’s a mock exam, you’re still in learning mode. Use this experience to learn as much as you can about taking the MBE.

Bar applicants often second guess themselves on MBE questions, and choose the wrong answer over the right answer they picked originally. It’s important to recognize this pattern and interrupt it.

Make note of how often you pick the right answer and then second-guess yourself and choose the wrong answer, and figure out whether this is a big problem for you.

If it is, make a pact with yourself that you will only change an answer if you can articulate a reason (in IRAC format) why you are changing it. This means that you can’t change an answer just because you think another answer choice looks prettier, or the question must not be as simple as it seems. You can only change an answer if you missed something, or forgot something, the first time.

Remember to trust yourself and trust the process.

You applied to law school with a dream. You wanted to be an attorney. Something pulled you towards a law career. Something was important enough for you to spend countless hours studying for the LSAT and writing and re-writing your personal statement. Remember WHY you embarked upon this journey in the first place. Hold on to that.

Bar study can be tedious, monotonous, and demoralizing. There is always more to do than can be done in a day, and every practice session can feel like negative feedback. The world is going on without you. There are concerts and protests, marches and picnics in the park.

Unfortunately, this is all part of the process of bar prep. But when you get down and feel like it’s not worth it, when you feel like you would be making more of a difference if you were out there organizing now, instead of inside studying, remember why you came to law school. Remember why you are doing all of this, sacrificing so much and working so hard. Remember all of the people who would love to be in your position – given the opportunity to be in a safe place studying, on the cusp of obtaining a law license.

This is a short period of time in a long life of service. It is all worth it in the end.  Always keep your end goal in mind. Keep your dream alive.

You can’t know absolutely everything that is testable on the bar exam. But, you can (and will) know most of it.

Most bar companies will give you big outline books. You don’t need to know everything that is in those outlines. You also have your lecture notes. Focus on those. The bar companies will give you the most important (most heavily tested) material in lectures. It won’t be absolutely everything, but it will be enough. Spending a lot of time outlining from, or trying to know everything in, the big outline books is not a good use of your time.

You will also learn new rules through essay and MBE practice. This can be very anxiety-producing for bar studiers. However, it is all part of the process, and you’ve got to trust the process. Take what you learn from your practice and add it to your lecture notes. That will be what you memorize from.

Strong students find it particularly stressful to not know exactly what you will be tested on. But, this isn’t a law school exam with a closed universe of testable material. The universe for the bar is enormous. There will be something you don’t know. But, that’s ok. You will still pass.

Many students tell me that their goal is to check off everything on their to do list from their bar company every day. I’ve written before about how you can’t possibly do everything your bar company assigns, and that’s true. But beyond the feasibility, you shouldn’t be blindly doing everything your bar company assigns because you need to do what makes the most sense for you. That will inevitably mean tweaking your to do list.

Your goal should be learning, not just blindly doing. That means that it is more important to be thoughtful and reflective about each task, than it is to complete them. There is no point to doing 50 MBE questions if you don’t have time to review them. Doing that doesn’t help you get similar questions right in the future. It’s the review, and the incorporation of rules and tips into your study materials, that ensures that your practice is useful.

The same is true for essays. Don’t just blindly do essays closed book and move on. Issue spot closed book, certainly, but if you don’t know the rule, look it up. It’s more important for you to review, apply, and then remember the correct rule, than it is to do an essay closed book because your bar company tells you to.

Trust the process, yes, but trust yourself too.

It can be hard to trust yourself at a time like this – when you’re going through something unknown and overwhelming. But, it is especially important in those moments to listen to the voice inside you and to trust yourself.

There is a lot of noise out there about the bar exam. Everyone you know will want to give you advice. (This blog included.) But the truth is that only you know what works for you. Don’t feel like you have to conform to the study methods that someone else said worked for them. Everyone is different, and therefore everyone needs to do slightly different things.

If something feels like it is not adding value, it’s better to spend time on something else. If you feel like you want to spend more time on something that you’re not getting to, prioritize it. Don’t do things just because someone else told you that’s what worked for them. Tune people out and trust what your brain is telling you.

Remember the three important things to do each day:

1. Lecture
2. Make/review the materials you will memorize from
3. Do some actual bar-style practice questions

Exactly how/when you do each thing is up to you.

The last 2-3 weeks of bar study will be devoted to memorization and practice. Everything you do up until that point is about learning, understanding, and internalizing. When you get to the end, your focus will be rote memorization to get as many rules as possible into your short-term memory.

You need to be thinking all along about what you are going to memorize from during that time period. You will need to be making study materials all along. You won’t have time at the end to create materials and memorize from them. You don’t want to leave a topic without having created the materials you will use to memorize that topic.

This is often an overwhelming task for bar studiers, and it is always time consuming. It is time well spent, however, if you are spending no more than 3-4 hours per day on it. More than that means you are taking time away from practice.

Remember that you don’t need to create perfect outlines, or make everything from scratch. Use the bar company materials, but make them your own. Annotate them to make them work best for you. Do something to make the materials work for you.

Use the notes from bar company lectures to make your study materials, not the big outline books. Lectures will contain the most important material. You can then add rules that you learn from essays and MBEs.

Bar companies underestimate the time you need to create study materials. Even if you are going to use their outlines or lecture handouts for memorization, you should review the material you covered every day (or the next morning). Seeing it again, reviewing it, writing on it, making changes, etc., all help you learn, understand, and internalize. If you have questions, get them answered now, along the way.

At this stage in the bar study process, many people are struggling with the idea of how much time to spend making study materials. You can see my previous post on the subject here.

Figuring out the right balance of timing and study materials is one of the most overwhelming aspects of bar study. Think about the end game – what will you want to have during the last 2-3 weeks of February when you are drilling repeatedly?

Remember that you don’t need perfect study materials, you just need study materials  that will give you the concepts you need to spot issues and write something on an essay. Don’t use the study materials you made in law school as a measure of what you need. Start with your lecture handouts.

Don’t spend more than four hours a day making study materials. If you’re doing so,  rethink your approach. Think about whether you can use the commercial materials and simply annotate them.

You will spend the next two months internalizing the rules through MBE and essay practice. That is all part of memorizing. You have studied enough law over the past three years that your brain knows how to retain material. It will stick, even if you don’t have perfect study materials.