Bar Exam Secrets

You Must Get Ready for Your Bar Exams in your Second Year of Law School and it would be really smart to do that in your first year.

This article is by no means comprehensive or related to all aspects of Bar Exam basics but we will give you advice practically no one else can give you.

BUYER BEWARE!

Before you purchase any bar exam from anyone. First check with the National Conference of Bar Examiners and see if they have any special offers going. Then carefully check the materials the review course is selling and see if they are the same and you can save $1000’s.

That’s right, the very people who test you on the bar are those who sell the materials you need to prepare for the bar. You figure that it should be free but no amount of money is ever enough for people who really could care less about you. If that isn’t enough many of the people who sell bar reviews simply sell you that same material at much higher prices and currently 8x higher in June 2020.

An absolute key question to ask such companies as Quimbee.com is are you licensed by the National Conference and is most or all of the material you sell the Conference’s material? Specifically ask what material the bar review course has that is custom or different?

We have a whole set of derogatory words but the kindest that we can print is “ripoff.” Even worse than that, most of the information and courses sold will not help you pass any bar exam given. THAT’S RIGHT. They take your money and still screw you on the most important thing you need to do well on any bar exam in the country.

Learn How to Write in law school and for bar exams at the same time.

The key to all bar exams is the ability to write essay answers. And good essay writing requires that you memorize the law. This means you know the law dead cold which translates to a cake walk on the essays and an easy pass on multiple choice questions. We know of only one product and course that addresses the issue of writing law school essays. It is the MP3 Exam Lecture by Study Partner. It is being updated to the MP3 2020 Exam Writing Lecture. If you purchase that in your first year of law school you will be 85% or more prepared for any bar exam given and you will only need to “top off” what you know in order to pass.

The smart move is to get the MP3 2020 Exam Writing Lecture in your first year and get good grades in law school and be well prepared for any bar exam you want to take. We have talked to 37 of the students who have gotten the MP3 Exam Writing Lecture in their first year and none of them paid full price for bar exam reviews or courses. Most of them just purchased used materials for a fraction of the price and got ready on their own. One of them failed the California Bar but passed on her second attempt. The rest all passed their first time.

The Money Train

The Bar Exam is a test administered by state Bar organizations which law school graduates must pass before being licensed to practice law. In some states, there may be other requirements, such as having completed three years of legal education. And when you think about all the heavy regulation of law schools you really have to wonder why you have to take a bar exam. It is not about competence. It is all about “show me the money.” States make a fortune off bar exams. They don’t actually make profits but they do hire lots of high paid people to make sure that after 3 years of law school you are capable of being an attorney, which of course their test has nothing do with being an attorney. Many of those hired have radical political agendas and hide out at the state bar until the next election or violent mass demonstration comes along. It is a self-sustaining industry and you fund it political agendas and all.

If they wanted to make sure you can be a lawyer all they would really have to do is to make you serve a paid apprenticeship for one year without taking the bar. You would be required to work in the public defender’s or prosecutor’s office or for judges at all levels. After the year you would be admitted to the bar. Enough said because nothing will ever change because it is a Money Train. Oh and just to rub it in; you pay for it.

Now someday some smart aspiring Communist or Socialist Party wannabe will label it racist and a symbol of white privilege. Until then, it is mandatory. And if you are that aspiring Che Guevara at least you can do is give us credit for the idea.

Each state’s Bar Exam is unique but now most state bars also use the MEE written exams so they are 100% identical. But of course in keeping with the money train, if you pass one of the 23 identical bar exams you only get licensed in one state and not all 23.

Almost all states use a two or three-day format incorporating the nationally administered Multistate Bar Exam, (MBE) a six-hour, 200 question multiple-choice exam as a component of their test. To learn more about the MBE please click on the MBE section to the left. State-specific law is often tested on a second day, usually in essay format. In most jurisdictions, the bar exam is offered twice a year, in February and July. We will address preparing for the essay portions of these exams in this article.

At the worst, prepare for your Bar Exam in your second year of law school and if you are really smart do it in your first year. The first issue you should address when preparing for the Bar Exam is to pick the state(s) you want to be licensed in. Once you have figured it out, then you want to prepare for your Bar Exam while you are still in law school. It is highly recommended that you make a list of the topics tested in the Bar Exam from each state and that you take those courses while you are in law school. Too many students graduate from law school without taking courses for the topics tested on their bar exams. The average Moron and we do mean Moron, does not even take the time to figure out such simple issues while they are still in law school. The time to prepare for your Bar Exam is when you are in law school and not hoping that a Bar Exam review course will get you through.

Get Copies of Old Bar Exams.

The second issue is to get copies of all the old Bar Exams given in that state. Many states have them on line and many states sell their old Bar Exams and many states put the old Bar Exams in law school libraries in their states. One thing is for sure, Bar Exam creators are predictable creatures of habit and they are lazy and they have a strong tendency to give Bar Exam tests that look a lot like each other. This author carefully reviewed the California State Bar Exam over a 40-year history and shucks to our surprise the same verbiage, the same issues, practically word for word in many instances the same Bar Exam tests repeated themselves with an unbelievable frequency. To not get old Bar Exam copies would be a serious mistake. A random sampling of four other major state Bar Exam tests produced the same results in each and every state Bar Exam.

You must practice taking as many of the old Bar Exams as you can get your hands on. Many states even give you model Bar Exam answers so you can check your work and know if your answers are up to snuff.

Good Bar Exam Preparation Involves Researching All the Casebooks used in all the Law Schools in the State.

The next issue also involves some simple detective work. Each state Bar Exam has a number of law schools in the state and some states even have non ABA approved law schools. To prepare for the Bar Exam in the states you want, call the bookstores of all the law schools in that state and find out for each area of law tested what casebooks each of the schools uses. To prepare for a Bar Exam you must study the cases in each of those casebooks. We discovered this issue when we took the California Bar Exam. The criminal portion of the Bar Exam was a eulogy to rape. Unfortunately, we had used the Boyce Perkins Criminal law casebook and it had a few cases about rape. Only after the exam when looking at another criminal law casebook did we find out where they got all the fact patterns for rape from. It was another casebook which was used in the law school 40 miles down the road. Had we just skimmed those cases we would have aced that portion of the Bar Exam. That is one of the reasons why so many students have problems passing bar exams. They never learned the material in all the different casebooks but just the one they used in class.

Casebriefsco.com has a Large Amount of the Casebooks used in Law School.

We recommend casebriefsco.com fbecause you get over 220 or so casebooks briefed (as of 2021) and you can easily skim the briefs and the fact patterns and the scope of the cases can be learned quickly. You also get flash cards, outlines, and all the reference material you will need to review for the exam. But more importantly you can learn how to write answers for the bar.

You May Want to Take a Bar Review Course.

Taking a bar review course for the state you intend to take the Bar Exam is recommended. We will not recommend anyone herein but we will give you some sage advice for picking a bar review course. First determine all the companies that offer courses within your target state. Get all their used literature you can from ex-students who have used them as well as pricing and discount offers. Determine if they have any actual pass rate statistics for their attendees and ask for it. Any material about pass rates that is not certified by an outside company or is qualified in any manner should immediately create an extremely wary attitude. How do you know when a Bar Exam review company is lying to you? When they are moving their lips.

Buyer beware. If they do not have any verified statistics you should look carefully at guarantees and ask for references. And check the materials to make sure they are not selling you National Conference materials at a higher price than you can get them direct from the, we love money, National Conference.

Bar Exam essays are just like law school exam essays. The best product we know that tells you in massive detail how to write a law school exam essay is the MP3 2020 Exam Writing Lecture. The same advice given in that lecture applies to Bar Exam tests. If you were not smart enough to get it and follow the advice in law school get one and follow the advice on your Bar Exam.

For the last tidbit, take the Bar Exam seriously and practice, practice, practice at least six months or more before the Bar Exam date you have chosen. You do not want to take a Bar Exam twice.