Public Service Announcement: Bar Exam Prep

My old post about how I studied for the bar exam is coming up in a lot of Google searches these days.  In case it's useful to anyone, I'm linking it here.  Multiple choice practice questions is the secret -- do an absurd amount of them. 

Also, I'm sorry you have to go through this.  There's no good reason for the bar exam being the way it is.  It's one of the things I think we should change.

UPDATE: I pulled my materials out of the basement to loan to a friend, and can give you some hard data.  Here's a sheet tracking hours spent studying each subject that I made partway through the process.  Download bar_prep_sheet.JPG (I gave myself credit for a whole hour if I spent 50 minutes straight on something; and in a few subjects that I thought I knew well from law school I gave myself a couple of hours credit for those.) 

I did 2,299 MBE questions and tracked my % right by subject.  I had old exams, as well as a Gilbert's test book with hard, intermediate, and easy questions that I practiced.  I started off  scoring about 55 - 60% right on the easy questions, and practiced until I was passing with at least a 75% on the advanced Gilberts' questions, which were considerably harder than the actual exam questions, I thought.  I also was getting in the 80-85% correct range on actual exam questions before I let myself stop taking practice questions. 

I started studying around June 4th, but took some weekends off during.  According to my records, I logged approximately 239 good study hours of work between when I started and the exam, on July 24, 25, 26.  2 of those hours were spent organizing materials and scheduling myself.  15 of those hours were credit given for law school classes, so don't really count.  That leaves 222 real study hours.  72 of those hours, as far as I can tell from my records, were spent taking and grading the practice MBE tests on the subjects of property, torts, crim law, crim procedure, evidence, contracts, and constitutional law.   The remaining hours were spent on everything else, with many subjects not getting a single hour of studying.

I spent a lot more time than that thinking I should be studying, but not actually doing it.

UPDATE 2: I can't recommend enough taking notes that incorporate pictures, color, and space (e.g. a poster, not an outline).  It will require you to make decisions about what should go near what else.  It will be a little bit more like playtime, so you'll do it.  And thinking about what kind of symbol or picture to draw to represent a concept will help you grasp the subject: you'll scroll mentally through the possible symbols you could use (a poison tree for criminal procedure, with an officer trying to eat the fruit? a flashlight to represent a search? an ear to represent hearsay, or maybe a text balloon?) and just that process will help your memory, by triggering creative thinking about the essential big points you're studying.  My posters are too big to reproduce here, but here's a section of the most boring and smallest -- my hurriedly made up Torts study sheet.  Download tortsnotes.JPG I suggest you try to makes something with some graphics and colors for your own synthesis of the material. 

Comments

[Melissa]

Hilarious and helpful at the same time.

[Michael]

Thanks for taking the time (back in June 2005 apparently) to post the UPDATES.

During law school, I have found many lawyers and law students anti-visual. Not me, I am a visual learner who will be incorporating into my bar review some of your ideas.