I'll do better than give you my advice, because my advice was wrong in the past and I paid for it. I'll give you the advice of Susan Case, former Director of Testing for the NCBE. She was quoted in 2013 as saying all the law you need to pass the MBE is contained in the four OPE Exams. I'd add the two study aids to that list, but that's just my opinion. Since the time of that interview, the NCBE continues to have those exams on its site (hint), and revised them in 2017 (double hint). Now they are revising them again and releasing them on March 25th in their learning platform (double hint, a winky, winky, and a slap upside the head). Take the hint. Wait until Monday and sign up.DepressedWorkerBee wrote:July 2019 Bar taker here - Themis opens up for us tomorrow!
I’ve got a really slow last semester - so I wanted to try and get started a bit early - not diving head into the whole course (want to avoid burnout), but wanted to start a few things now slowly.
Any advice for how to use Themis and get started before the suggest start day of May 20? Also have S&T, Critical Flash Cards, and Adaptibar.
Appreciate any advice!
On the other hand, those tests are not equators. Over one third of the test (60 questions) are equators, questions designed to be hard and used for comparison purposes with other test groups (30 questions from last February and 30 from July). The NCBE materials will not be equators, you won't find them in Themis, Adaptibar or BarMax,they are never released. In fact, the majority of the questions on these platforms are not recommended by the NCBE. The law gets old, the format changes, and what is tested drifts. Where these programs excel is in giving you the OPEs and the Study Aids, and you don't need a middleman for that. Trust me, I spent a year doing them.
Take a red magic marker to your outlines and cross out anything that's not on the Subject Matter Outline. For example, you don't want to study Riparian Rights, they are not tested. So if you want to be fully prepared for the exam, do what the examiners say, use the NCBE platform, and then find a substitute for these difficult questions. That would be Barbri and Kaplan. No one's saying what's in the secret sauce, but if you find any other source of questions whose customers routinely report much higher final scores than their practice scores, differences that can't be accounted for by the scale, let me in on it.