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Beauty4brains

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Help question with themis Bar prep

Post by Beauty4brains » Sun Jan 06, 2019 3:05 am

Please no insults, I already feel bad enough.
I graduated law school, worked hard but didn't get the best grades. I'm someone who struggled in law school. My memory isn't the best but still graduated. I did well in classes I enjoyed ( criminal procedure 1& 2, trial ad. torts and any other classes that weren't boring)

I took themis before with a 68% completion rate and failed the New York Bar. I had a score of 218.

So I decided to start a little early re-taking it Themis for February Bar. I will complete 100% of the course because I know it takes me a while to get it. I'm at 27.5% so far. I do everything except read the outlines( the information doesn't stay and its very time consuming)

My questions are

1) If I do complete 100% (which I will, I have no choice) Do I still have to memorize on my own? I'm scared that I won't have that much time to fully memorize a lot of information.
2) I am getting around44- 47% of the multiple choice in Property, Contracts, and Civ pro and 57% in torts for the MBE. I know its the beginning but honestly what are my chances?

I'm really working hard to type out all the rules of law in each essay I did. So I can get better at memorization. I try to do the same for the Multiple choice question.

Thoughts and Advice?

Lancair

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Re: Help question with themis Bar prep

Post by Lancair » Sun Jan 06, 2019 8:23 pm

Beauty4brains wrote:Please no insults, I already feel bad enough.
I graduated law school, worked hard but didn't get the best grades. I'm someone who struggled in law school. My memory isn't the best but still graduated. I did well in classes I enjoyed ( criminal procedure 1& 2, trial ad. torts and any other classes that weren't boring)

I took themis before with a 68% completion rate and failed the New York Bar. I had a score of 218.

So I decided to start a little early re-taking it Themis for February Bar. I will complete 100% of the course because I know it takes me a while to get it. I'm at 27.5% so far. I do everything except read the outlines( the information doesn't stay and its very time consuming)

My questions are

1) If I do complete 100% (which I will, I have no choice) Do I still have to memorize on my own? I'm scared that I won't have that much time to fully memorize a lot of information.
2) I am getting around44- 47% of the multiple choice in Property, Contracts, and Civ pro and 57% in torts for the MBE. I know its the beginning but honestly what are my chances?

I'm really working hard to type out all the rules of law in each essay I did. So I can get better at memorization. I try to do the same for the Multiple choice question.

Thoughts and Advice?
Memorisation is a personal thing. Personally, I am finding the best way to imprint the material is doing practice questions and essays. Re-writing notes and flash cards doesn't really work for me.

One thing that is handy to do is on the MBE questions is that you can see in the Themis progress section for MBE questions is the sub-sections for each area of law. If you can identify some areas that you are particularly struggling with, review these topics and then use the quizbuilder to generate sets with just those topics. I find this a pretty effective way to solidify my knowledge in weak areas.

Good luck - if you have a read through this forum there are plenty of stories of success after multiple attempts.

Beauty4brains

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Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2019 2:30 am

Re: Help question with themis Bar prep

Post by Beauty4brains » Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:56 am

Thank you. I am also trying to answer Multiple choice in the quiz builder right after I learn about a topic

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anon sequitur

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Re: Help question with themis Bar prep

Post by anon sequitur » Mon Jan 07, 2019 1:07 pm

I don't think getting to 100% is a magic bullet, in fact, having done Themis, I think a lot of the work they assign you is of pretty marginal value. If you're at 57% MBE in some subjects and 47% in other areas, you have a lot of room for improvement in these areas, and I'd suggest focusing most of your time (perhaps the vast majority of your time) on the MBE--and that's pretty much going to have to include going over the outlines.

The outlines suck, they are so big that they take forever, but they have the details that you need to improve your MBE score. I understand that you just can't sit and read the outline without zoning out, I was the same way. What I did was to do practice MBE questions, and for every question that was difficult at all (regardless of whether I got it right or not), I would look at the outline and figure out the black letter law for that issue. I'd then add an explanation of that issue to my own personal outline. Eventually, I'd have a personal outline that covered everything that caused me trouble for a particular subject, and only those things. That gives you something much, much better than any outline anyone can ever make for you. This also forced me to figure out what was causing me problems, and what wasn't. For me, this was slow and arduous work, but it was vastly more productive than listening to the lectures or going over outlines or just doing practice questions and hoping to get things through repetition.

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SilvermanBarPrep

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Re: Help question with themis Bar prep

Post by SilvermanBarPrep » Mon Jan 07, 2019 2:14 pm

Just keep working at pulling those percentages up. Keep an eye on the numbers and work until you've pulled them up as close to 70% as you can. In other words, memorizing law, though foundational, is not what this game is about. It's about applying the law in a way that leads you to the correct conclusion. At the moment, you're not doing that often enough but have that as your only target and you'll improve at this test for sure.

Sean (Silverman Bar Exam Tutoring)

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