Thread: Is taking BarBri the safest way to prepare for California bar exam?

If not, please recommend other review classes/books/tutors

It depends

If you are a challenged California bar exam candidate with an LSAT-score of 155 or lower, or if you are graduating from a non-ABA law school or from an ABA school that typically performs poorly on the California bar exam (e.g., Western State University), or if you are graduating at the bottom third of your law school class, attending a mass-produced, one-size-fits-all bar review is a poor decision. But unfortunately, it isn't a decision at all. Many challenged candidates take BAR/BRI for no reason other than everybody takes BAR/BRI, which is a ludicrous reason.
To me, the math is simple. If everybody at your law school takes BAR/BRI, and your law school has a horrible pass rate, why would you want to jump off that same cliff? It just makes no sense.
I do not think BAR/BRI is a course without merit. In fact, ABA law schools, typically, have an overall pass rate of 65-70% on the California bar exam, depending on whether it is a February or July exam. BAR/BRI works just fine with students who already possess the thought-process and analytical-writing skills required to pass the California bar exam on their first attempt. (I must admit that had I taken BAR/BRI, I would have passed; it would have worked for me.)
But Stanford, UCLA and USC law grads (and formerly myself) are not the candidates I have in mind. These students, all of whom probably take BAR/BRI, will be served just fine by BAR/BRI. In fact, these students, with their high-LSAT minds, could undoubtedly save themselves some money and some drive time by signing up with a less-expensive online course and still pass. The herd mentality that is rampant among law students will likely keep them from doing so, but these students could pass with any course that has decent-enough materials and a schedule to follow.
But in California, there are plenty of law schools with low pass rates (take Trinity Law School, for example) and unskilled students (take American College of Law, for example), and it does matter which course these students take. In fact, non-ABA law schools have a combined first-timer pass rate of only 24%. Yet, bar after bar, these students undoubtedly flock to BAR/BRI. And these are the students who, for some reason, just don't do the math. And these are the students that I repeatedly chide and admonish in the pages of this journal -The Challenged California Bar Exam Candidate.
The graded essay portion of BAR/BRI is the biggest joke in the world. When I began to suspect that the graders were completely ineffective, I typed up and submitted the example given in the book as a "90 point" essay. It got a failing score from the BAR/BRI grader! I paid several thousand dollars for THAT?

Source:Barbri is Worthless

I think it is the safest way

Just because most people are using it, which means most bar examiners used it as their review class for their bar exams. Therefore, even if the methodology isn't the greatest, you at least know what other people are getting. Plus, the peace of mind you get... ah... monopoly