Bar Exam: Day 2

gregh — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:42:28 -0500

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.

Bar Review: Day 31

gregh — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:16:07 -0500

Today was our simulated Multistate Bar Exam ("MBE"). The MBE is a 6-hour multiple choice test with 200 questions. It was... grueling.

By the end of the second session -- it's split into two 3-hour chunks -- I really just wanted the whole thing to end. In addition, I'm a bit disappointed with my performance. I'm missing a lot of the same question types over and over it seems, so something I'm doing is not working. I scored 120/200, which is not great. I was hoping for a minimum of 130. From rumblings I've been hearing, the average of Bar/Bri students is somewhere around 110. I'll get my score report in a week.

Next up: figure out where I went wrong and determine what to rectify. I've been needing to do that, anyway. I've been utilizing the StudySmart software Bar/Bri offers, which keeps track of the types of questions you miss, and there are clear patterns. I need to get the MBE licked so I can concentrate on essays.

Otherwise Occupied - mbe

Bar Exam: Day 2

Bar Review: Day 31