Did not pass CA bar, self-study tips? Forum

[guitar519]

Hi all,
Been at this forum since pre-law school. Thought I should hit this forum to get some suggestions.

I took Jay Chavkin's Personal Bar Prep in Los Angeles, California and failed. 9/10 people that I personally knew failed who took his course (and he blamed us of course). I don't want to blame him and just want to move on to study for the February bar.

Since I spent $3000+ on his course, I can't afford to spend more money on other tutors. I heard great things about one timers but also had a friend who took him and failed. So I quickly realized it really depends on effective self studying.

I already bought adaptibar (let me know if you need a $50 code). Looking into lean sheets. My friend also is letting me borrow her barbri convisers - thinking about making my own outlines since I never saw them before, but maybe a waste of time. Just wondering if anyone has suggestions, schedules, etc. for self-studying. My PTs were 60 & 70 so I'm not too worried. My essays range from 45-65 and mbes were in 1200s.

Thank you!

[robinhoodOO]

Hi all,
Been at this forum since pre-law school. Thought I should hit this forum to get some suggestions.

I took Jay Chavkin's Personal Bar Prep in Los Angeles, California and failed. 9/10 people that I personally knew failed who took his course (and he blamed us of course). I don't want to blame him and just want to move on to study for the February bar.

Since I spent $3000+ on his course, I can't afford to spend more money on other tutors. I heard great things about one timers but also had a friend who took him and failed. So I quickly realized it really depends on effective self studying.

I already bought adaptibar (let me know if you need a $50 code). Looking into lean sheets. My friend also is letting me borrow her barbri convisers - thinking about making my own outlines since I never saw them before, but maybe a waste of time. Just wondering if anyone has suggestions, schedules, etc. for self-studying. My PTs were 60 & 70 so I'm not too worried. My essays range from 45-65 and mbes were in 1200s.

Thank you!

From what I've gathered, self-studiers tend to fail more than those that take traditional bar review courses. I personally think this is because they don't have specific regimens that they stick to and/or they work full/part-time and do not commit the necessary time needed to fully prepare.

With that said, I took one of the traditional bar review courses and essentially found my self employing more of a 'self-study' method. I did not like the lectures and ended up mostly ignoring them towards the end. I did not like the professor outlines that were provided, so I wrote my own instead. A huge portion of my learning the material actually came from writing my outlines. Thus, I'd consider buying an outline (Barbri or Kaplan) on Ebay and using it to rewrite some of the materials to be similar to the types of outlines you may have written in law school. This practice will be a substitute for lectures and may even take 2-3 days for every subject.

I'd also set up a daily/weekly schedule, outlining exactly what you're going to do in terms of writing your outlines, doing and reviewing essays, number of MBE's, etc. Stick to it and ensure that it covers all of the materials/areas. Start by breaking it down into subject. You should have a good idea how to do this based on the other guy's course.

Since you can get essays and PT's from the Bar's website, there's no reason to pay for these. So, basically buy the outline materials, get a nice schedule set up, and you'll basically have the foundation yourself that would otherwise be provided by a bar course. You probably don't need lean sheets (I paid for them and they were okay, but not remotely necessary--in fact, they're shorthand/mnemonics conflicted with my own and made things more confusing).

Anyway, if I were to re-do things, this is where I'd start. Hope this helps, and good luck!

[horrorbusiness]

I passed on my first try this July, and I did a combination of barbri and self-study. I essentially quit barbri after about a month (although I still used the conviser heavily), and self studied after that.

MBE: I practiced for the MBE by doing Adaptibar questions. I didn't take evidence or crim pro in law school, so I had to learn these subjects from scratch. I don't have a great memory so I forgot a lot of nuance from the other subjects. I also was never taught a ton of the nuance in contracts, conlaw, and property in the first place. Personally, I learned nothing from barbri video lectures, and I'd retain nothing from just reading straight through the conviser. So I used an alternative strategy that was painful but brutally effective: just start doing Adaptibar questions. With evidence questions (for example), in the beginning I couldn't distinguish between the answer choices at all (and I'd take like 6+ minutes per question), but I'd take my best guess, then study the Adaptibar explanation of why the right answer was right and the wrong answers were wrong. With the Adaptibar explanation in mind, I'd then read whatever the conviser outline had written on that issue being tested and I'd make sure I really understood what was going on. Try to do a few hundred questions like this for every subject. It's a very slow and painful process at first - you'll get a lot wrong - but you'll get much faster and the questions will start to seem much easier. Towards the end, I came to understand even my worst subject, evidence, pretty well and I was averaging over 70% on MBE mixed sets. I ended up scoring somewhere between 145-150 on the real MBE by doing this method, and I'm pretty bad at multiple choice and even made a number of really dumb mistakes on the MBE. That isn't an amazing score, but it's enough to pass, and I got there through self studying while learning two new subjects entirely. NOTE: civ pro is a tricky MBE subject. The Adaptibar civ pro questions are unusable garbage and are not worth looking at in my opinion. The questions that barbri offered totally missed the mark of what was actually tested (barbri seemed to test mostly big ticket issues like SMJ and PJ, where the real MBE liked to focus on obscure rules related to appeal, issue preclusion, claim preclusion, and other stuff I'm forgetting now). Try to get ahold of all the real, released civ pro questions - I think NCBE released a PDF of 10 civ pro questions as well as a PDF of 21 mixed questions that included some civ pro. If possible, I guess at least try to get ahold of the barbri study smart MBE questions because they're better than Adaptibar by far. This is a section where you might have to bite the bullet and just try to memorize the conviser.

Essays: I practiced for the essays by using baressays.com and this method: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 1&t=248756. You'll need a premium subscription to baressays (important) so you can have access to all the essays and model answers for each. The method is described well in that thread, but basically you'll read an essay prompt, read and try to understand the model answer, then reread the prompt and try to rewrite the model answer from memory. Do this enough times and you'll memorize and understand the model answer. (Important note: focus on memorizing the RULES and understanding them... the analysis/application is pretty easy once you have the law down, so don't devote too much practice time to that.) Eventually, for each essay you've done, you'll have memorized (and will be able to recite very quickly and accurately) all the rule statements in that essay, and it'll also become very obvious which issues the essay wanted you to talk about. Then do this with every essay on baressays. Yes, every essay. I did this with nearly 130 essays total by the time I took the bar exam. The trick is to never actually write out entire essays; instead, just outline the essay by spotting the issues and writing out the appropriate rule statement for each issue. By the time you have the rule statements memorized, the analysis/application part will be painfully obvious to you and you won't want to waste time writing out application of law to fact. Toward the end of my prep, I would start redoing all of the essays I had outlined before, sometimes writing out all the appropriate rule statements or sometimes just making sure that I could identify each issue and fully recall its accompanying rule statement. On my third and final pass of each essay (these were the last few days before the actual exam), I'd write out a very skeletal outline like this: http://pastebin.com/vrg8TEjQ. This was mostly to make sure I still spotted each issue that I would have wanted to talk about if that were my essay prompt on the real bar exam; by this point you'll have the rules pretty firmly memorized and won't need to retype them any more.) An outline this skeletal only takes about 10 minutes to type out, so I'd easily review 10, 15, or even 20 essays per day this way. This enabled me to review a good number of essays from each topic in those last few days leading up to the exam, so I entered the exam feeling pretty fresh with every topic.

PTs: I guess I read the library first then the case file. I briefly outlined everything as I read it. I only did 3 or 4 PTs in practice, and honestly I really winged them on the real exam.

[Nybar2015]

That was very informative.
Could you please clarify if there is any difference in the essay Q & A in barbri or state bar website and baressays. Sorry but failing yo understand why one would pay for baressays when you have all essays in the website???

[Nybar2015]

I passed on my first try this July, and I did a combination of barbri and self-study. I essentially quit barbri after about a month (although I still used the conviser heavily), and self studied after that.

MBE: I practiced for the MBE by doing Adaptibar questions. I didn't take evidence or crim pro in law school, so I had to learn these subjects from scratch. I don't have a great memory so I forgot a lot of nuance from the other subjects. I also was never taught a ton of the nuance in contracts, conlaw, and property in the first place. Personally, I learned nothing from barbri video lectures, and I'd retain nothing from just reading straight through the conviser. So I used an alternative strategy that was painful but brutally effective: just start doing Adaptibar questions. With evidence questions (for example), in the beginning I couldn't distinguish between the answer choices at all (and I'd take like 6+ minutes per question), but I'd take my best guess, then study the Adaptibar explanation of why the right answer was right and the wrong answers were wrong. With the Adaptibar explanation in mind, I'd then read whatever the conviser outline had written on that issue being tested and I'd make sure I really understood what was going on. Try to do a few hundred questions like this for every subject. It's a very slow and painful process at first - you'll get a lot wrong - but you'll get much faster and the questions will start to seem much easier. Towards the end, I came to understand even my worst subject, evidence, pretty well and I was averaging over 70% on MBE mixed sets. I ended up scoring somewhere between 145-150 on the real MBE by doing this method, and I'm pretty bad at multiple choice and even made a number of really dumb mistakes on the MBE. That isn't an amazing score, but it's enough to pass, and I got there through self studying while learning two new subjects entirely. NOTE: civ pro is a tricky MBE subject. The Adaptibar civ pro questions are unusable garbage and are not worth looking at in my opinion. The questions that barbri offered totally missed the mark of what was actually tested (barbri seemed to test mostly big ticket issues like SMJ and PJ, where the real MBE liked to focus on obscure rules related to appeal, issue preclusion, claim preclusion, and other stuff I'm forgetting now). Try to get ahold of all the real, released civ pro questions - I think NCBE released a PDF of 10 civ pro questions as well as a PDF of 21 mixed questions that included some civ pro. If possible, I guess at least try to get ahold of the barbri study smart MBE questions because they're better than Adaptibar by far. This is a section where you might have to bite the bullet and just try to memorize the conviser.

Essays: I practiced for the essays by using baressays.com and this method: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 1&t=248756. You'll need a premium subscription to baressays (important) so you can have access to all the essays and model answers for each. The method is described well in that thread, but basically you'll read an essay prompt, read and try to understand the model answer, then reread the prompt and try to rewrite the model answer from memory. Do this enough times and you'll memorize and understand the model answer. (Important note: focus on memorizing the RULES and understanding them... the analysis/application is pretty easy once you have the law down, so don't devote too much practice time to that.) Eventually, for each essay you've done, you'll have memorized (and will be able to recite very quickly and accurately) all the rule statements in that essay, and it'll also become very obvious which issues the essay wanted you to talk about. Then do this with every essay on baressays. Yes, every essay. I did this with nearly 130 essays total by the time I took the bar exam. The trick is to never actually write out entire essays; instead, just outline the essay by spotting the issues and writing out the appropriate rule statement for each issue. By the time you have the rule statements memorized, the analysis/application part will be painfully obvious to you and you won't want to waste time writing out application of law to fact. Toward the end of my prep, I would start redoing all of the essays I had outlined before, sometimes writing out all the appropriate rule statements or sometimes just making sure that I could identify each issue and fully recall its accompanying rule statement. On my third and final pass of each essay (these were the last few days before the actual exam), I'd write out a very skeletal outline like this: http://pastebin.com/vrg8TEjQ. This was mostly to make sure I still spotted each issue that I would have wanted to talk about if that were my essay prompt on the real bar exam; by this point you'll have the rules pretty firmly memorized and won't need to retype them any more.) An outline this skeletal only takes about 10 minutes to type out, so I'd easily review 10, 15, or even 20 essays per day this way. This enabled me to review a good number of essays from each topic in those last few days leading up to the exam, so I entered the exam feeling pretty fresh with every topic.

PTs: I guess I read the library first then the case file. I briefly outlined everything as I read it. I only did 3 or 4 PTs in practice, and honestly I really winged them on the real exam.

That was very informative.
Could you please clarify if there is any difference in the essay Q & A in barbri or state bar website and baressays. Sorry but failing yo understand why one would pay for baressays when you have all essays in the website???

[james11]

For those of you taking the upcoming exam, I'm reposting helpful information from a past thread that got me through it.

The poster about asked about the benefits to baressays.com - it is the only place you can see a full range of scores (both high and low) for each question. Looking through this in depth is key in figuring out what you need to do.

This is the original thread post - viewtopic.php?f=3&t=213457&start=1375

You can do it, and possibly only with a little over a month of studying. Some background: I failed a class in the Spring semester and had to write a makeup research paper to get my diploma this year. Because I had to do this paper, I couldn't get started with my bar studying until the last week of June. During the 5 weeks before the bar exam, I studied about 6-8 quality hours per day (although I did step it up to 8-10 hours the week before the exam). I didn't watch video lectures (except for Evidence) and I hardly used any of the material provided by bar prep courses. By and large, I stopped doing MBE questions in the last week. Despite all this, I passed, and I left each day of the bar exam feeling like I had passed.

(A) For MBE questions, I used the BarMax iPad app to drill. But in terms of really learning some of the nuances for harder MBE questions, I got a lot of mileage out of the Emmanuel's "Strategies and Tactics" for the MBE. I think my scores averaged around 70% by the time the bar rolled around.

(B) With respect to the non-PT essays, I highly recommend you do the following:

(1) Buy a set of Leansheets for the California Bar (you can Google up "leansheets California Bar") and commit to memorizing and being able to regurgitate the materials from those sheets. The Leansheets are not exhaustive, but they are good enough, and most of all humanly manageable. The only downside to the Leansheets is that they are very tersely worded; you might need an old BarBri Conviser to give you more verbose explanations of the rules.

(2) Get a subscriptions with baressays dot com. The pairing of model essays with old questions is a GODSEND. What I did was I went through all the model essays for the past 7-8 years for a given topic, and I just wrote down all the different headings and subheadings. This gave me an idea of what the distribution was for legal issues tested on the exam. As you'll see, 90% of the issues that come up for any essay in any topic is something that has been asked before in the past 5-6 years. Once I knew what the predictable "universe" of recurring issues was, I just made sure that I could spit out a rules statement that more or less hit all the major elements of the model answer's rule statement. The essays are all about the setup; once you have your rules statement, you just need to methodically work through each element and discuss whether it is present or not based on the facts.

(3) PRACTICE YOUR BUTT OFF. With a baressays.com account, you have no excuse for being unprepared when it comes to the 1-hour essays. Once you've done step (2) above, do every single essay you can for a given topic, starting from older essays and working your way up to more recent ones (you want to practice with the most recent questions the week before the exam). When you first do essays, stick with one subject per day, and do one essay at a time for at least 2-3 essays a day. Sticking to one topic and doing multiple essays in that topic will make it easier for you to learn and internalize the rules. Starting from at least two weeks before the exam, you should be doing the essays in a cluster of three to simulate the actual test taking experience.

Remember: it is the practicing which will actually get you to memorize your rule statements. Always compare your answer against the model essay. Don't rely on a grader, as all that will do is give you an excuse to wait around for the grader to get back to you. Immediately after you do a practice essay take a 10 minute break tops, and compare your answer against the model. By reviewing right after taking a practice exam you maximize your retention of the material. I kid you not, I felt like I was going to fail until about a week before the bar exam when I flew out to California early and locked myself in a hotel room for a week, and just drilled essays all day (well not really *all* day; just 8-10 hours). Until that week, all of my rules statements were very vague and iffy; constantly writing them down in a timed setting, in response to a hypo, was what really crystallized those rules for me. Also, if you run out of essays to practice, just start from the beginning again. Even if you recognize a hypo, you get the benefit of refreshing your memory by just going through the practice of typing your rules statements into a blank document.

(C) With respect to the PTs: once again, practice is king. And really what it is you're practicing with the PTs is reading and drafting. I think half the battle with PTs is just being able to finish in a coherent way, and that requires development of reading and drafting skills.

"Reading skills" refers to the ability to: quickly decide whether material is relevant or not; markup the library and file in a way which allows you to return to key facts/language/issues efficiently; and get through the material at a good pace with adequate comprehension.

"Drafting skills" refers to the ability to: identify and select a format which allows you to present your arguments in a way which is both logical (e.g., arranging issues from most important/convincing to least important/convincing), efficient (e.g., with a minimum of repetition, by using phrases like "supra" and "see analysis above"), and easy to read (e.g., using ample underlining and empty spaces to make reading your essay easier on the graders); and phrase your thoughts in clear and succinct language.

Ultimately, my stance on the PTs is this: for most mortals, it's just not possible to identify all the possible issues and present complete analysis for each of those issues. What you need to create is a product that passes the smell test: it looks lawyerly (formatting and organization); it sounds lawyerly (logical and methodical writing and analysis); and it shows a sufficient amount of intelligence and effort (provides at least some kind of response to each legal question raised by the client/call of the question, and in doing so provides a meaty analysis for 70-80% of the possible issues, and nearly all of the really big ones).

Given my position above, when it came to PTs all I did to cross-check my answers was to make sure I hit most of the issues that the model answers (or high scoring applicant answers) identified. I didn't stress out about my answer's format looking very different from the model or high scoring answers. As long as my answers were objectively well-organized, easy to read, and complete (i.e., introductory and conclusory sections, and no headings or subheadings left unfilled), I knew I was in good shape.

TL; DR: For the MBE: drill using BarMax; learn nuances from Emmanuel's "Strategies and Tactics for the MBE". For the essays: Learn the law from Leansheets, using BarBri Conviser as a supplement if you need more detail/explanation; get a baressays subscription and practice essays until your fingers drop off. For PTs: keep practicing until you can consistently draft memos which are well-organized, easy to read, hit most of the issues, and look complete (no unfilled sections; complete intro and conclusion).

And in general: practice all of the above until you are able to consistently finish with an extra 10-15 minutes for each hour of work. So be able to finish individual essays with 10-15 minutes to spare, and be able to finish your PTs with about half an hour to spare. That will give you enough time to tidy up your PTs, double-check for any quick issues you might have missed, or go back to a previous essay in order to flesh out another issue. Also, you never know what condition you'll be in during the exam. Being able to finish early gives you a safety buffer. I had bronchitis the week before and during the exam, and I lost a good 5-10 minutes of every hour having to get up, go outside, cough and drink water.

[robinhoodOO]

That was very informative.
Could you please clarify if there is any difference in the essay Q & A in barbri or state bar website and baressays. Sorry but failing yo understand why one would pay for baressays when you have all essays in the website???

I believe Bar Essays provides previously graded essays for comparison of, for example, what a score of 55 looks like on a particular essay. The essays are still all available online for you to review and take from the Bar.