Was the MBE harder than you expected Forum

[spleenworship]

Wait, you were actually able to leave early if you were done? Fuck off, Colorado. I had to sit there with my thumb up my ass for an hour in both the morning and afternoon.

Yeah, provided we didn't leave in the last 15 minutes, we could leave anytime we were done.

[crEEp]

Wow. First your "sue exam soft" thread and now this comment.

Um, when did I ever say or imply that I wanted to sue ExamSoft? You have me mixed up with someone else, and I really don't appreciate being accused of something I didn't say.

Maybe, I dunno, people realized after staring at the really hard ones for 2 minutes straight that they didn't know the answer and just made their best guess maybe?

Personally, I usually did 200 questions in 3.5 hours. I took 5 hours and a few minutes on this exam. So me leaving early had zero to do with it being easy, because my leaving early was actually leaving late.

Maybe, but that's just speculation on your part. I saw lots of people leave very early, but I wasn't one of them. I thought the exam was tricky with many instances of the "right answer for the question that you mistakenly thought we asked" listed in the choices.

[Tanicius]

If the exam was so difficult, then why did so many people complete it with 30 minutes to spare? Did they just want to get an early start on studying for february or something?

There were a bunch of questions I could not have answered even with the long outline open in front of me, because they were about "best answer" discrepencies that come down to the personal opinion of the test writer and not actual legal rules.

better watch out about talking about questions or you're gonna get banned.

I'm so sorry that I erred on the side of caution and refused to discuss specifics with you when the sticky message from the administrator clearly bans users permanently for doing so but accepts general discussion of the test so long as no specifics are brought up.

[spleenworship]

If the exam was so difficult, then why did so many people complete it with 30 minutes to spare? Did they just want to get an early start on studying for february or something?

There were a bunch of questions I could not have answered even with the long outline open in front of me, because they were about "best answer" discrepencies that come down to the personal opinion of the test writer and not actual legal rules.

better watch out about talking about questions or you're gonna get banned.

This comment by tani was pretty general. I don't think there is a banable offense here.

[crEEp]

I'm so sorry that I erred on the side of caution and refused to discuss specifics with you when the sticky message from the administrator clearly bans users permanently for doing so but accepts general discussion of the test so long as no specifics are brought up.

TLS bans for talking about specifics now? Christ, what a joke this place has become.

[Tanicius]

I'm so sorry that I erred on the side of caution and refused to discuss specifics with you when the sticky message from the administrator clearly bans users permanently for doing so but accepts general discussion of the test so long as no specifics are brought up.

TLS bans for talking about specifics now? Christ, what a joke this place has become.

Probably because they don't want to risk getting sued by the NCBE. The test instructions very clearly they reserved the right to pursue criminal and civil penalties for copyright infringement by anyone caught discussing questions or answers on "forums".

[spleenworship]

Wow. First your "sue exam soft" thread and now this comment.

Um, when did I ever say or imply that I wanted to sue ExamSoft? You have me mixed up with someone else, and I really don't appreciate being accused of something I didn't say.

...

Maybe, but that's just speculation on your part. I saw lots of people leave very early, but I wasn't one of them. I thought the exam was tricky with many instances of the "right answer for the question that you mistakenly thought we asked" listed in the choices.

You are speculating that they left early because it was easy. Unlike you my speculation seems to be based on a lot more evidence, anecdotal though it might be.

And I apologize for thinking you wanted to sue exam soft. You actually just want to dispute your payment to them because you are all butthurt about a minor inconvenience. My bad.

[crEEp]

You are speculating that they left early because it was easy. Unlike you my speculation seems to be based on a lot more evidence, anecdotal though it might be.

And I apologize for thinking you wanted to sue exam soft. You actually just want to dispute your payment to them because you are all butthurt about a minor inconvenience. My bad.

Can you just stop with the personal attacks? It adds nothing to your argument, it isn't witty, and it amounts to nothing more than verbal pollution.

[LeDique]

God I love these aspies that come out of the woodwork after they encounter a minor difficulty during the bar exam.

[spleenworship]

You are speculating that they left early because it was easy. Unlike you my speculation seems to be based on a lot more evidence, anecdotal though it might be.

And I apologize for thinking you wanted to sue exam soft. You actually just want to dispute your payment to them because you are all butthurt about a minor inconvenience. My bad.

Can you just stop with the personal attacks? It adds nothing to your argument, it isn't witty, and it amounts to nothing more than verbal pollution.

It's trying to cover for you shitting up threads.

[crEEp]

Probably because they don't want to risk getting sued by the NCBE. The test instructions very clearly they reserved the right to pursue criminal and civil penalties for copyright infringement by anyone caught discussing questions or answers on "forums".

They can't pursue criminal penalties for discussing specific questions and a civil suit would just be hilarious. It's an empty threat because they don't want to rewrite the exam twice a year.

[n900mixalot]

There was a glaring error in one of the fact patterns. I re-read it over and over and over and over and over to make sure that I wasn't going crazy, but sure enough, there it was and it was. I psyched myself out thinking, well, maybe they used a different word because they wanted to confuse test takers, but then looking at the answers, changing the word didn't change the possible outcomes in a way that made any of the answers the BEST answer.

I took the Bar in February and the MBE was totally fair then. I knew what I knew, I knew what I didn't know, and then there were some questions that stumped me but I did really well and got a good-enough score ... I obviously messed something else up (the MPT), and lost out by a number of points (<20), but that's neither here or there.

HOWEVER THIS time, it was a complete joke. It was as if they opened up every bar prep course FULL outline, and pulled out the most obscure and discreet, fine points of law, then tried to pawn off terribly confusing questions about those.

If I do well enough to get an acceptable score on the MBE, it will be based entirely on luck because I'd say about 60% of those questions were garbage.

Also, I finished with about 30-45 minutes to spare, and started to go over questions I'd marked as ones I should review but all that I discovered was that they were STILL terrible questions. So I decided to beat the traffic.

[LAWYER2]

I didn't feel the MBE was any harder or easier, it simply was what it was.
I felt good about it, till hearing some of my friends and TLS responses. Aside from the obvious experiment questions, there were only a couple I had to guess at.

[Prairie]

i found the afternoon session quite a bit harder than the morning.

[SEngland]

the MBE was very difficult and in my opinion made Barbri's questions seem like a cakewalk. I thought the MEEs and MPT was much easier than anticipated, though.

[MoneyMay]

I think the questions were comparable to BarBri but the PM session did have some weird stuff on there as well as some VERY specific things where I could eliminate two answers but then more or less had to make my best guess between the final 2 choices left.

IMHO what really made it hard was fatigue and stress that comes with game day that just can't be simulated when we practice, and again particularly in the PM after going through 9 hours of the exam already. There were EASY questions I had to read 4 or 5 times just because I was exhausted and towards the last 20 questions or so of the PM I was in total autopilot mode and I can't really remember anything that I did.

[mr_toad]

My mind blanked starting around 175... Not happy thinking about failing due to MBE after it seemed to be my strong suit for the last weeks.

[AJS30]

I feel like they wanted to go out with a bang before rolling out the new MBE....and they really banged me.

[Xferr]

Probably because they don't want to risk getting sued by the NCBE. The test instructions very clearly they reserved the right to pursue criminal and civil penalties for copyright infringement by anyone caught discussing questions or answers on "forums".

They can't pursue criminal penalties for discussing specific questions and a civil suit would just be hilarious. It's an empty threat because they don't want to rewrite the exam twice a year.

TLS would get the aggregate of all of the infringements through a secondary liability theory. It could cost them a ton of money, and anyone with potential secondary liability has a massive target on their heads. Good thing you don't run this site, you would have bankrupted it.

[SEngland]

Any chance we see a 20-30 point curve?

[jumpingjack]

the MBE was very difficult and in my opinion made Barbri's questions seem like a cakewalk. I thought the MEEs and MPT was much easier than anticipated, though.

This is actually me. The MBE was a complete joke, but the MEE/MPT, even the MEE topics that were more obscure or I didn't know I still knew enough to not make a complete fool of myself.

[jigglypuffdreams]

I took some time to relax and process it a bit. Honestly, a handful of the questions were "wtf" and I'm still not completely sure about them even after referencing long outlines and seeing people discuss them online, buuut I guess I'd rather be confused about things than admit exactly which points I lost, especially when it's ambiguous. But the biggest difference between them and the 2000 practice questions is there were less "gimme" questions. They were more on par with the tricky practice questions, but when you saw them for the first time. The majority of the questions were just fair, difficult questions. A minority were gimme, a handful were out of nowhere (those are the ones that stick in your brain out of 200), and then there were some "ugh, I wish this wasn't experimental because it's ridiculously straightforward" questions. Although honestly I think the super easy civ pro experimental questions are meant to weed out impossibly easy civ pro questions, because if people who didn't even study MBE civ pro can answer them, you know they're no good.

[LSATNightmares]

I took some time to relax and process it a bit. Honestly, a handful of the questions were "wtf" and I'm still not completely sure about them even after referencing long outlines and seeing people discuss them online, buuut I guess I'd rather be confused about things than admit exactly which points I lost, especially when it's ambiguous. But the biggest difference between them and the 2000 practice questions is there were less "gimme" questions. They were more on par with the tricky practice questions, but when you saw them for the first time. The majority of the questions were just fair, difficult questions. A minority were gimme, a handful were out of nowhere (those are the ones that stick in your brain out of 200), and then there were some "ugh, I wish this wasn't experimental because it's ridiculously straightforward" questions. Although honestly I think the super easy civ pro experimental questions are meant to weed out impossibly easy civ pro questions, because if people who didn't even study MBE civ pro can answer them, you know they're no good.

So, I wasn't the only one who thought there was Civ Pro on there? Anytime I mentioned it to others, they looked at me like I had two heads or that I couldn't recognize an Evidence question. I could have sworn that I had a super difficult Civ Pro question.

[LeDique]

I took some time to relax and process it a bit. Honestly, a handful of the questions were "wtf" and I'm still not completely sure about them even after referencing long outlines and seeing people discuss them online, buuut I guess I'd rather be confused about things than admit exactly which points I lost, especially when it's ambiguous. But the biggest difference between them and the 2000 practice questions is there were less "gimme" questions. They were more on par with the tricky practice questions, but when you saw them for the first time. The majority of the questions were just fair, difficult questions. A minority were gimme, a handful were out of nowhere (those are the ones that stick in your brain out of 200), and then there were some "ugh, I wish this wasn't experimental because it's ridiculously straightforward" questions. Although honestly I think the super easy civ pro experimental questions are meant to weed out impossibly easy civ pro questions, because if people who didn't even study MBE civ pro can answer them, you know they're no good.

So, I wasn't the only one who thought there was Civ Pro on there? Anytime I mentioned it to others, they looked at me like I had two heads or that I couldn't recognize an Evidence question. I could have sworn that I had a super difficult Civ Pro question.

There were a couple that were definitely Civ Pro, and a privilege one that was arguably Civ Pro or Evidence. Kaplan had a few very similar question to the privilege one as Evidence fwiw.

[SammyJ]

So am I right in thinking that because the MBE is scaled and not curved, it's possible that the passage rate could be a lot lower than usual? Or would a scale fix the difficulty factor in the same way that a curve would? I guess what I'm wondering is, will passage rates be similar to previous administrations? I'm confused.