Bar Exam Advice Contents |
|
Background I graduated from law school in May 2009 and immediately went into bar-study mode. Using BarBri’s self-study iPod program, I studied from the end of May until I took the California Bar Exam at the end of July. I bit my fingernails for almost four months before learning, in late November, that I passed. Obligatory disclaimer-type statement What I present below reflects my own unique experience with the California Bar. My advice may or may not work for you. Your own chances of success on the bar will not necessarily be improved by following my pointers. Since I can't guarantee anything, I don't. That being said, I do hope that you can glean something useful from what I have to say about the Bar Exam. Synopsis The most crucial part of my message to you, the prospective bar examinee, can be summed up in three words: don’t freak out. As near as I can tell, the Bar Exam is designed to unsettle you. It’s a hazing ritual. It’s not meant to be fair. Learning everything is virtually impossible. But that’s okay! Everyone who takes the exam is dealing with the same thing. You don’t need to know everything perfectly. If that were a requirement, California would have maybe half a dozen new lawyers every six months, and no more. The Bar Exam is a test of minimal competency, not superhuman mastery. As the BarBri folks will tell you, those who do fail the exam frequently miss a passing score by only a handful of points. The gap between passing and failing is often very thin—a few MBE questions or a single issue on an essay can make all the difference. Since being nervous interferes with memory retrieval, nervous people make errors that they usually would not. Nervous bar examinees lose points on issues that they know, solely because of nerves. The point is this: simply keeping calm can put you into “passing” territory. By the time you’re thinking about the bar exam, you’ve already survived law school. You’ve handled a hundred pages of reading a night, juggled multiple writing projects at once, and taken finals on little to no sleep. You’ve made it through everything law school has to throw at you. You know how to study. The Bar Exam is just an extension of the same—you have all the tools you need to get through it. Tip #1. Use BarBri. I took BarBri, and I passed, so I default to advocating BarBri for others, too. Of course, I don’t know what the other bar-study programs are like, whether on an absolute scale or in dollar-to-value ratio; one of the other outfits might be better than BarBri. All I know is that for me, passing followed BarBri classes, and I might have failed if I didn’t take those classes. A fair, if tentative, conclusion is that BarBri helped. Actually, I wasn’t going to take BarBri at all. For the first couple of years of law school, I thought to myself: I’m smart. I can handle studying on my own. I don’t need to fork out thousands of dollars for review classes! All I need is some outlines, and I’ll be fine! I kept these plans until the end of my second summer. Sometime in early August 2008, I was in a small bar near City Hall in San Francisco, toasting the completion of an internship at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. I mentioned my solo-study plans to my supervising attorney. A moment later, I found myself surrounded by wide-eyed attorneys staring at me, all commanding firmly: TAKE BARBRI! At that point, I acquiesced to the wisdom of experience and consensus. I was glad I did. At last count, the Bar Exam tested thirteen distinct subject areas, and more if you count state-specific treatments of topics separately. There’s a grossly large amount of information you need to digest, and BarBri does an excellent job of organizing the material, presenting it so it’s comprehensible, and providing a schedule to follow. After a while doing BarBri, I realized that there was no way I would have been able to deal with everything on my own. I didn’t really realize the scope of the project until I’d been at it for a few weeks, and I doubt I’d have ever figured it out by muddling through alone. Tip #2. Don’t feel like you have to do everything. BarBri imposes a daunting study schedule, sometimes putting two or three subject areas into a single day, along with practice MBEs and essays. If you can do all that, every day, all the time, awesome. You’re all set already. If you can’t, don’t worry—effective bar preparation does not require doing everything that BarBri tells you to do. I fell pretty far short of doing everything myself. By the time I started studying, I was already behind: the official first day of BarBri classes was my graduation day, and several days afterward were filled up with family stuff. Study day #1 found me facing an almost week-long backlog. Starting out behind seemed bad enough, but I never caught up. I only fell more behind. No matter how hard I tried to pick up the slack, my brains burned out before I could get there. Naturally, I freaked out. By the time exams rolled around, I had a list of all the essays, practice tests, and MBEs I’d never done—probably a little more than a third of what was assigned. But it all turned out okay! No doubt I could have used more practice; if I’d done a few more practice torts essays, maybe I’d have been able to nail the elements of malicious prosecution on the exam instead of having to make them up. If I’d spent a little more time with constitutional law, maybe I’d have been able to spout Dormant Commerce Clause doctrine just as Professor Chemerinsky laid it out in his lecture, instead of paraphrasing. In much the same way as the model essay answers embody an ideal, so too does the study schedule. You don’t need to meet the ideal in order to pass the exam any more than your essays need to mirror the model answers. You don’t need to get all the MBEs right, you don’t need to be able to spot and discuss every issue perfectly, and you don’t need to abide unerringly by BarBri’s recommended course of study. Tip #3. Write out all your essay answers. Don’t just outline them. Somewhat in contrast to tip #2, here I suggest doing more than BarBri assigns. BarBri’s method includes many practice essay questions that they assign you to outline, but not write out in full. In my experience, outlining alone is bad; writing out fully is good. Of course, you also can also construct an outline—just don’t stop there. The problem with merely outlining an essay is that it’s easy to get the broad strokes right, feel like you know what’s going on, and call it good enough. Then you look at the sample answer, which follows the same general scheme as your outline, and you feel accomplished. What you miss in outlining are the details—the subtler points of law and the concrete application to the facts—that really mark the difference between fluency and weakness in a subject area. Theoretically, your outline could include all of those finer points, but you might as well be writing full sentences and paragraphs at that point. By writing a full answer, you’re much more likely to spot a gap in your knowledge than by outlining. Another good reason to write out in full is that you’ll be doing just that on the exam. An outline takes maybe fifteen minutes, give or take a few. On the exam, you’ll have to outline and write the whole essay in an hour, which is not easy. When I started writing essays, it took me an hour and a half to finish. It was weeks before I got my time down to the one-hour range. Writing a full essay answer is more time-consuming and difficult than writing just an outline, but it’s well worth the extra effort. You’ll get far more out of it, not only by more thoroughly testing yourself on the subject matter but also by practicing under conditions more similar to what you’ll experience on testing day. Tip #4. Be balanced in your approach to bar study. All other things being equal, the more studying, the better, but other things need doing, too—like eating, sleeping, socializing, and procrastinating. For me, bar study was subject to the law of diminishing returns; in a given day, hour eight was far less useful than hour one, and hour nine might have been simply counterproductive. Pretty much everyone who gives bar advice says the same thing: make sure you eat enough, sleep enough, and exercise enough. I’m adding my voice to the cacophony because it’s a message that bears repeating. It’s really okay to take time off. Studying for the bar isn’t like cramming the night before an exam; it isn’t like pre-finals reading week where you do nothing but outline for four or five days. Bar studies are a marathon, not a sprint, and you have to pace yourself. Final thoughts Studying for the bar is a ten-week process that will suck the life out of you and possibly make you wonder why you went to law school in the first place. There’s nothing fun about it, and the long wait after taking the exam is little better. But it’s doable. Keep on chugging, studying like you know how to already, and you’ll get there. The easiest part of the whole process is actually taking the exam; the worst is worrying about it ahead of time. Once time is called at the end of the performance exam on the third day, the spontaneous applause that breaks out over the entire exam room will tell you that everyone else is just as relieved as you are to be done with the thing. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about what I’ve written here. |