The Activist Guide to Passing the Bar Exam

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 the day of the exam.

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.

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.

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.

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 (and more practice, of course) 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. Be concrete – what do you see yourself physically doing during those last couple of weeks?

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 your own.

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.

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.

Your bar company will include the most heavily tested material in the lecture outline. However, they cannot include absolutely everything that can be – or has ever been – tested on the bar exam. As a consequence, you will come across additional rules as you do MBE and essay practice. Make sure you find a way to incorporate those rules in your memorization materials. They are important.

It’s not a glitch or a failure on the part of your bar review company. It’s all part of the process. Trust the process, and trust yourself. You’ve got this!

Over the past few years, bar review companies have expanded the products and services they offer in an effort to enhance student learning. Obviously, this is a laudable goal. However, it has also left many bar studiers feeling overwhelmed with assignments.

The most beneficial activity you can do is practice actual bar exam questions – essays, MBEs, and MPTs. If your bar company is assigning other types of questions, which don’t replicate exam questions, decide whether they are enhancing your understanding of the doctrine or your exam skills enough to spend time on them. It’s not all or nothing. You can choose to do extra assignments for some subjects and not for others. The same is true for reading the big outlines thoroughly.

You don’t have to do 100% of the bar company’s assignments in order to pass. You need to make strategic choices. Don’t just mindlessly go through your bar company’s assignments in order to check them off. Think about what enhances your learning the most.

Remember that at this stage there are three main things you should be doing every day:

1. Actively watch bar company lectures.
2. Solidify your study materials for the material covered in your lecture (make them yourself or annotate your lecture notes).
3. Do practice. Essays, MBEs, and/or MPTs, every single day.

Many people are beginning bar study this week, though some began last week. In order to get off to a good start, it’s important to establish and assess your routine. You want to develop a study schedule that works for you. You want to do your most difficult tasks at the time that your brain functions best. If you’re not a morning person and your plan for the summer is to wake up and start studying at 6am, it’s going to be a struggle. You have plenty of time to get ready to wake up early on exam day. You can build up to that.

Bar study may feel easy in the beginning. All of those stories you heard about 10-12 hour days seem like exaggerations. They’re not. The first week or so will be slower. Things will pick up quickly. It’s important to get into a good routine now so that you have places you feel comfortable working, and know what tasks you prefer to do at what times of day. You can switch things up. Switching up locations in particular can be very helpful. But you still need a plan.

Remember that you want to do three things every day – watch lecture, make your study materials, and do practice. You don’t need to make your own study materials from scratch. It’s fine to annotate commercial materials. But you need to think ahead to the last two weeks when you will be focusing on memorization, and make sure that every day you have the materials you will use to memorize the material you learned that day. You won’t have any time to make materials later on.

You also need to do at least two hours of practice every day. That could be essays, MBEs, or MPTs. Ideally, it would be some combination of them. But don’t just do practice for the sake of doing it. You need to thoroughly review each answer and answer explanation and understand why you answered a question correctly or incorrectly. Then you need to do something about the question you answered incorrectly – clarify the rule in your outline, add the rule to your outline or a flashcard, write down a test-taking tip that you learned. Always keep moving forward, and always keep reflecting on everything you’re doing.