More on the Bar Exam

In the weeks since bar results were released, I've interacted with my classmates enough to pick up some gossip about who passed and who didn't. The list seems pretty arbitrary.  Many slackers passed; many good students failed. Based on these results, I do not think the bar exam does much to separate the good candidates from the poor.

You might wonder how my bar exam scores panned out. I didn't botch the essays so badly as I thought. All my essays passed, though the scores were thoroughly mediocre. This tends to confirm a theory I've heard more than once: the essay questions are intended to test one's ability to write, not so much one's knowledge of the law. Probably half of what I said about the law in my essays was made up on the spot.

My multiple choice scores were fairly strong, which made for an overall score well within the passing range. My total score was just above the midway point between barely passing and top paper. A  popular aphorism goes, "If you passed the bar by more than one point, you studied too hard," but I have no regrets about my hours of preparation. I prefer an aphorism that BarBri puts on some of its t-shirts: "Do it once. Do it right. Never do it again."

Bar Results

PASS. Winning, tiger blood, etcetera. Congratulations to all my fellow travelers.

Bar Exam Postmortem

I don't think I exaggerate when I say the first day of the bar exam was one of the ten worst days of my life. If I fail, I might upgrade it to one of the five worst. I broke the seal on my essay test booklet and felt a little sicker every time I turned a page. The questions seemed calculated to expose my blind spots, and I certainly deserve to fail that part of the test. I might have failed it by a substantial margin.

Fortunately, a strong multiple choice score can whitewash a bad essay score. I wrote in an earlier post that the essays account for just 25% of one's score, but that wasn't quite accurate. The essay and performance tests combine to make up 50%, but I don't know how they are weighted against each other. In any case, multiple choice counts for the other 50%.

So my future in the legal profession boils down to whether I aced the multiple choice test. That means anything could happen. I answered perhaps a quarter of the questions with confidence. The rest were more or less educated guesses between two or three plausible responses. This is consistent with the way my practice tests went. If my hit-to-miss ratio on the real thing was at least as good as my ratio on the practice tests, I have a fighting chance at getting that law license.

Results are made public in five weeks.

I Took the Arkansas Bar Exam

I'll write something about the bar exam experience after my blood cools. For now, there is only this: I feel like I should demand my money back because, in two hundred questions, I was never asked about the rule against perpetuities.

Bar Prep Summary

I had eight weeks to prepare for the bar exam. I did not take a commercial prep course. This is what I did instead:

• Reviewed 570 pages of commercial outlines (about 70% BarBri and 30% Emanuel, just because that was what I could get free or cheap; I preferred BarBri's outlines)
• Answered 1,028 multiple choice questions (735, or 71%, correctly)
• Wrote 42 practice essays (15,600 words total)
• Wrote 5 practice performance tests (3,900 words total)
  
• Invested 180-200 hours altogether

By most standards this is lax preparation, but I feel like it should be enough. I broke my back to get good grades for the last three years, so I shouldn't have to cram here at the end. My practice work adds up to roughly five bar exams. Number six will count.

Inventory

This is the kit I'm bringing with me to the bar exam.
1. Laptop (essays are on day one).
2. Two pencils, two pens, and two highlighters. No sense risking being caught without the right writing implement.
3. Eraser. I probably won't need this until day two (multiple choice), but I might as well pack it now.
4. Soda. Because I think the stress-reducing effects of a swig of sugar water will outweigh any loss of time that results from extra bathroom breaks.
5. Earplugs. I never used these for law school tests, but the bar exam will probably be more crowded and louder.
6. Gum. The all-purpose stress reliever.
7. Origami paper. Applicants have been instructed to take their seats thirty minutes before test time. I'll need something to pass the time.

Essay Reality Check

I just answered the essay questions from the February 2011 Arkansas bar, and the results improved my disposition immensely.

Previously, I had written some two dozen practice essays. After comparing those to the model answers, I felt like I was just riding the line between passing and failing. The beauty of the February exam questions is that I have no model answers to compare to. Instead, the State Board of Law Examiners publishes the top answers by actual applicants. Now I see what the graders really expect, and these answers are just as rushed and sloppy as mine. Of the six questions on the test, I only really blew it on one. I'll take that in a heartbeat.

There Are No Right Answers

I've been getting my multiple choice practice from old BarBri books, but today I decided to mix things up with a hundred questions out of an Emanuel book at the library. Emanuel and BarBri obviously base their practice questions on a common set of released bar questions, because many of the Emanuel questions were substantially identical to questions I had already seen in my BarBri books. Only names and minor details were changed.

But here's the thing: in at least two cases, the Emanuel and BarBri books had opposite answers. Opposite! Contrast this passage from BarBri's answer key:

The general rule is that one who possesses an animal not customarily domesticated in that area is strictly liable for all harm done by the animal . . . . For trespassers, however, strict liability is not imposed against landowners.

with this passage from Emanuel's:

. . . the skunk will be considered a wild animal, making Householder strictly liable for damage it creates. As a result, Walker's status as a trespasser will not relieve Householder of liability.

Why must you mess with my head, Emanuel? I don't need this cognitive dissonance a week before the exam, so I'm just going to assume that the rule I learned first (BarBri's) is right.

Improving

As planned, I have started targeting my study at a few problem areas. The early results are promising: my last two hundred practice questions yielded a 74% success rate. That's not ideal, but I'll take it. I'd love to hit 80%, but I'll be satisfied if I can keep my average in the 70s from now until exam day.

Undertaught and Overtaxed

I'm annoyed when I come across a point of law that is heavily tested on the bar but somehow got little or no coverage in the relevant class. Couldn't the contracts professor have spared a few days to teach contract assignments and third party beneficiaries? Did the Torts professor really think we'd learn conversion in fifteen minutes? Those topics are killing me.

Bar Review as Math Problem

I've answered 528 practice multiple choice questions to date, and I just can't seem to get my average past 66%. That means I've put down more than 150 wrong answers so far.

I decided to mine that data by putting it in a spreadsheet. I made a list of every rule of law I got wrong, sortable by subject. It took six or eight hours to type it all up, but I am happy with the results. I came up with seventeen legal principles that I botched at least twice. Six of those got me three or more times. Altogether, these repeat offenders accounted for forty-four of my wrong answers, or more than a quarter of the total.

Now my path is clear: if I can master these seventeen rules--no more than a few pages of notes, really--I should see a marked improvement in my multiple choice scores. That's the theory, anyway.

Performance Preparation

The "performance" part of the bar exam consists of ten or fifteen pages of cases, statutes, depositions, evidence, or what-have-you and instructions to draft a document using them. It isn't really possible to study for a test that supplies all the applicable law, but I gave it a go. I took four mock exams over two days. The documents called for in my practice tests were a closing argument, a brief, a memo, and a demand letter. I did well at assignments like this in school, but mostly because I spent a lot of time on them. The documents I put together in ninety minutes looked rather incomplete. Hopefully that is what the graders will be expecting. At any rate, now that I have a feel for what the test is like, I'm setting it aside. The rest of my study time is going to be devoted to getting my multiple choice scores up.

No More Essays

I downloaded the 2006 bar exam essays from the National Conference of Bar Examiners website. After answering six questions and comparing my responses to the model answers, I am satisfied that I would have passed, if barely. Barely is good enough for me, so I don't plan to look at the essay subjects again until just before the exam.

Three weeks to go.

Essays, Essays, Essays

In my bar preparation, I am giving the essay questions short shrift. This is a sensible strategy for a few reasons: Most importantly, the essays are not weighted as heavily as the multiple choice questions (25% vs. 50%). For another thing, it's hard to practice for the essay test because the grading is not objective--I have model answers to my practice questions, but those are "ideal" answers. They don't really tell me if my crummy answers would pass or fail. This lack of feedback on practice essays may be the biggest disadvantage to blowing off a commercial prep class. Lastly, let's not kid ourselves, it's easier to fake it on an essay test than on a multiple choice test. After three years of law school, I should be able to write a plausible essay on even a branch of law I've never heard of.

With all that in mind, I picked up a book from the library that contains practice questions and short outlines (most are under twenty pages) of the essay subjects not covered on the multiple choice test. I also got copies of longer outlines of subjects I didn't study in school (commercial paper, conflict of laws) or did poorly in (family law). For the last week I have been reading quickly through one or two outlines per day, then writing two or three practice essays. To date I've written thirteen such essays. Most have been pretty poor, but my expectations are low. One day this week I plan to wrap up my essay prep by giving myself a complete practice test, meaning six essays in three hours. After that I'll spend a maximum of two days practicing for the "performance" portion of the bar (a test of one's ability to interpret and draft legal documents), then it's back to multiple choice drills.

Scant Progress

Three weeks after graduation and five weeks before the bar exam, I have finished my first pass through the multiple choice test topics. My performance to date on practice questions is 283 out of 428, or 66%. That's weak. The conventional wisdom I've heard is that one should be able to hit 80% consistently on practice tests before taking the bar.

Even so, I have to put the multiple choice stuff down for now. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to spend a week or two writing practice essays. Maybe the multiple choice questions will look easier when I have fresh eyes.

Developing a Study Plan

I don't know what my colleagues are doing in their Barbri and Kaplan classes, but here is the pattern I've slid into as I review for the multiple choice portion of the bar exam:

I spend six or eight hours going through a subject outline, taking notes (these are duplicative of notes I already have, but note-taking is the only way I can force myself to read slowly and carefully). After each outline, I take a sixty- to seventy-five-question practice test on that subject. The test takes about two hours, so by the time I review the questions I missed I've spent about ten hours on each subject. With six subjects tested by multiple choice (constitutional law, contracts, criminal law, evidence, property, and torts), I'm on a pace to get through a complete review in sixty hours of study time.

After that, I'll spend some time prepping for the essay and practicum portions of the test, then go back for more multiple choice practice in July.

Bar Prep Begins

My first efforts at studying for the bar exam have been demoralizing. This week I took practice exams in the areas of constitutional law and contracts. I scored 73% and 59%, respectively, and that was after several hours of review. I obviously need to improve my study methods if I want to get up to speed in two months.

How I Plan to Pass the Bar

There seems to be a presumption on the part of the school administration that every graduate is going to take a commercial bar exam prep course. I don't know what percentage of my classmates have signed up for one of these, but it certainly isn't in the cards for me. Rather than spend $1200-2000 on a full-on course, I bought these gently used books on eBay for $160. I think they'll be more than enough to get me across the finish line if I can maintain the discipline to study them thoroughly.

Bar Application IN

I just got email notification that the State Board of Law Examiners has received my application to take the July bar exam. I beat the April 1 deadline by three days. This might just be the scariest deadline in all of law school. Late applications are not accepted--if you're one day late, you can take the exam in February. In possibly related news, I missed work today because of headaches and nausea. Stress? May be.

Easily the worst part of the bar application process was having to wrangle letters of recommendation. It's never fun to ask people for favors. Still, there are psychological benefits to asking your friends and acquaintances to write nice things about you. Awww, thanks, guys!

Defending My Character

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours filling out the thirteen-page "character questionnaire" portion of the bar exam application. I still need to get three letters of recommendation and have myself fingerprinted. It must be this onerous screening process that earned the legal profession its sterling reputation for integrity.