gregh  2008-07-30 16:42  barexam  mbe   

California bar exam day 2. Yay!

Day 2 is the Multistate Bar Exam ("MBE"), a 200-question multiple choice exam given in two 3-hour parts. It's a tough patch of work, but nowhere near as exhausting as a performance test like yesterday's. I feel a whole lot better today post-exam than I did yesterday. On the other hand, the MBE's also a crapshoot. I felt pretty good about some areas that had given me problems before (mortgages!), but as often occurs on the MBE, you find yourself down to 2 correct questions and must choose the "best" response. I've been convinced by a friend that on at least one of those questions, I chose incorrectly.

I use one of the time management techniques suggested by Professor Sakai (a USF prof, and one of the Bar/Bri lecturers) to split the questions into blocks of 20, based on the size of the vertical columns on the answer sheet. I budget 33 minutes per column, which leaves me with 15 minutes of buffer. In the morning, I was running around 7 minutes behind going into the last block of 20. In the afternoon, I had 55 minutes remaining going into the last block of 20. Go figure. It's all meaningless until I find out whether I pass or fail.

One more day to go. There's plenty of anxiety about the remaining areas to be tested on the essay tomorrow. There's also lots of speculation that after the basic performance test we got yesterday that tomorrow's may be harder. I'm not too bothered by that -- we had some toughies thrown at us in Legal Drafting, and I did best on those ones. However, there's always the possibility of not doing best on those, and that's just losing the free points that should come from the performance tests.