My advice is to get all your emotions out of the way first!
I just wanted to post encouragement to those of you who are facing the possibility of re-taking the CA bar. I just passed, after failing the July 2006 exam (which I thought was pretty easy even though I failed!; the Feb. 2007 exam was much harder). Don't let anyone discourage you and tell you how much harder it is as a repeat taker and don't let the statistics get you down either....it' s all a bunch of crap anyways.
My advice is to get all your emotions out of the way first and do whatever it takes to purge all disappointment, sadness, anger, etc and then focus on studying again. I recommend studying full time your second time around (I took time off from work to study again full time) and approach it all as if it is your first time taking the bar. I think re-takers often make the mistake of trying to concentrate on one's "weaknesses" too much based upon the failed scores and can often miss the big picture of how comprehensive the entire exam is. I've heard that the reason why the passage rate for retakers is so low is because most retakers have to work and study for the bar which decreases their chances because you need to put more time into studying.
I was close to passing the July 2006 exam. My problem areas where the PTs and MBE's by slight margins. For my second time, I re-took
BarBri because I had some black letter law issues and knew that I needed a disciplined paced program to study to every day; on the July 2006 exam, I passed most of the essays and failed only the ones where I did not remember/know the law.
I really didn't remember all that much from studying over the summer as I had mentally purged everything I had learned so I felt as though retaking
BarBri would be fine for me....and it worked! I thought about taking something else but since I knew my problem was more about memorizing law rather than technique, I knew
BarBri would be fine. Do not let
BarBri try to convince you that you need to take their special essays class; they use the same essays/books as they do in their normal class and charge like 3 times more than to just retake
BarBri.
I also took John Holtz's Performance Exam seminar. Words cannot express how highly I think of his technique and I am firmly convinced this seminar pushed my score into the pass range as I only scored 60s on both PTs on the July 2006 exam.
BarBri does not teach you how to take PT's; they teach to how to barely get by on the PTs, if at all. Scoring a 60 on a PT just makes it that much harder for you to pass, but with a little bit of effort, you can really push
your score way higher using John's method and that just takes the pressure off your essays or the MBE's if you are struggling with those. His class is really overwhelming at first but if you practice his technique on your own, you will get it.
And by the way, my computer crashed during President's Day Holiday...that was like 11 days prior to the exam and I had a total freak out and lost around 5 days of studying because I could not get anyone to fix my computer and I had to face the prospect of writing the exam by hand with my atrocious handwriting. I got my computer fixed just in time and I passed!
Source: Steve Davis