#bar exam

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My instagram feed has officially switched from graduation photos to bar exam stress posts, so I thought I’d step in and share some tips and tricks I was too tired to share last year

Firstly: A seemingly counter-intuitive piece of advice. Ignore everyone’s advice on how to study. This post is intended to help you study the best way you can for yourself, not to tell you what to do. When I was studying for the bar, the bar prep coordinator at my school would send us these horrifying emails every day - “you should be doing at least 50 multiple choice questions a day” in the first week, “you should be done with your lectures now” with a month left, and “you should be taking at least one full length exam a week” by the last week. My friends and I would stress together about how we weren’t doing nearly as much as she was telling us too and we felt behind because of it, despite being up to date with our individual programs. Ignoring her advice and focusing on what I needed to do was significantly less stressful and got me to where I needed to be!

Trust your bar prep program, but also recognize when you can skip or rearrange tasks. Following the program should get you across the finish line, but some of the tasks they’ll assign are just not going to be useful to you as an individual and you can skip them without guilt. I tried to be a completionist, but for the last two weeks of studying, all Barbri wanted me to do was write MEE essays over and over again and that simply wasn’t effective for me at that stage. I needed to be doing more MBE practice and reviewing outlines, not spending four hours a day IRAC niche topics. I also took the giant Barbri MBE practice test early in the summer when the program said I should, but I was VERY unprepared for it and performed VERY poorly, which I regretted when I heard how many of my friends pushed it back by several weeks - I was so unprepared that it wasn’t a particularly useful tool for figuring out my weaknesses, and they didn’t have any other comparably sized MBE practices for me to take once I ultimately did feel prepared.

Definitely do some timed practice, particularly with the MEE essays. Can’t tell you how many people told me they ran out of time writing their essay section. Writing a well-structured and argued essay in 30 minutes is difficult, writing several back to back is freaking killer. Practice the timing so you’re ready for it on the test and can throw out a lightening speed IRAC.

If you’re taking a virtual bar this summer, take the opportunity they give you to learn how the technology works. Maybe actually take the practice MPT that they put up on your screen. I legitimately lost like 10 minutes of writing time trying to figure out where to move and how to position the pop-out MPT files and navigate between those files and my own notes, and the body of my essay. So take the opportunity to learn how to do that so you don’t do the same.

I worked throughout bar prep, so I wasn’t really able to develop any kind of routine for myself, and those “set a schedule for yourself” tips never worked for me. But I did make a point of setting goals for the day and then telling myself I would log off after I reached a certain point. On the few days when I pushed it and did like, a crazy 12 hours of barbri or something, I’d find I was less motivated the next day, to the point where I effectively lost any studying “lead” I might’ve given myself and only did like two hours of work. It just wasn’t worth it to burn myself out. The last two weeks or so before the exam might be a different story (crunch time and all that), but remember, it’s a ~marathon and not a sprint~

I said I wasn’t going to tell you how to study, but I will share one technique that worked for me that I thought was clever - I recorded myself reading various outlines (shorter versions, each recording was like 15-20 mins) and then whenever my bar prep company would say “review your outline,” I would take a walk or go for a drive and listen to the recording rather than sitting at my desk. Getting away from my desk was CLUTCH and god, this was just such a good idea. Sometimes I’d run errands while listening to the recordings too, which was some much needed multi-tasking. As we got closer and closer to the bar, I listened to this audio so constantly I could effectively recite it and I felt it was just way easier to take in than reading and re-reading the same the same passage. Did it feel strange listening to my own voice on loop? I mean yes lmao but it worked and it got me away from my laptop for a while when I really needed that!

Good luck everyone! Just a few months to go. Feel free to ask me if you have any kind of specific questions, I love answering questions!