11-05-2008
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 40
| How I passed the Main Bar Exam
from trs on how he passed the Main Bar Exam: Quote:
Here’s what I did:
Made a Schedule . . . and stuck to it. Mostly. The BarBri materials I bought included a week by week schedule, the general gist of which is this: two to three days of lecture in the morning for the big MBE subjects (Real Property, Torts, etc.), one for the lesser, non-MBE subjects (Agency, Secured Transactions, Domestic Relations) with practice multiple choice questions of increasing difficulty in the afternoons, but offset so that you review a subject in the morning and do another subject’s question in the afternoon. It includes other things too, like reading FinePoints (TM) and other stuff that mostly seems guaranteed to stress people out because it’s impossible to do in a day and stay sane. The BarBri schedule had hit every subject by the end of the first week in July, I aimed for July 1, and came in about a week late.
Listened to Some Lectures . . . and outlined them as I did it. Reading outlines (which BarBri recommends as review) is next to useless. But you’ve got to review these materials somehow, before doing practice questions. Again, the materials I bought included some Pmbr lectures on the MBE subjects, I just went through them and took notes. I never looked back at the notes, but it kept me engaged. I wish I knew where to get these for free: I looked for a torrent but came up empty. Looks like there might be stuff out there now. Plz Seed!
Did many many practice questions . . . and then did more. Quote from Pmbr founder Robert Feinberg, somewhere in the middle of a Criminal Law lecture: “If after four years of college and three years of law school, you can’t bullshit your way through an essay, you have no business being a lawyer.” That’s about right. Don’t get me wrong, I started to freak out when it was two weeks before the exam and I hadn’t written a single essay. Practice essays. But to get down the basic material in the big MBE subjects (which will be a substantial portion of the state essays anyway), nothing beats doing questions. I tried to complete and review 100 questions each day. Pmbr questions have a reputation for being diabolically hard. BarBri splits its questions into three levels of difficulty, which was helpful to ease in. The hardest questions were about the same as Pmbr.
Corrected and Reviewed What I Got Wrong . . . then plugged it into Genius. I heard about the program from this BoingBoing post, but the basic principle comes from this Wired article that I’d read a few weeks earlier. It’s basically computer-based flashcards, which are a lot easier than regular flashcards to make, and the program keeps track of what you’ve learned. I tried to do about an hour of these a day, eventually I had hundreds in the program.
Eventually, Looked at Some Essays . . . but didn’t write a single one. The BarBri materials I bought had essay questions from each state going back thirty years, along with the answers. Starting about two weeks before the exam (should have been a month), I reviewed the state-specific outlines, then read through the questions and tried to outline an answer. Then I checked my answer against the sample answer. Mistakes went into Genius. Repeat.
Those were my days: go to the library, listen to lectures for three hours or so, take a lunch break, do a bunch of practice questions, correct them and put the mistakes into Genius. The next morning, or that evening I did an hour or so of review in Genius. I usually got to the library between 9:30 and 10, was always home by 5, but frequently earlier. For two months. Then I took the exam for three days.
And I passed.
| Category: ME - Maine Bar Exam
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