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caitlin1016

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Barbri Essay Answers

Post by caitlin1016 » Sun Jun 02, 2019 6:33 pm

I am wondering how people tend to use the Barbri essay answers? I took the Illinois bar and passed with Barbri but the model answers were much longer than the character count permitted in Illinois and I found that frustrating during the actual exam because I hit the character count on every essay. I'm taking the California bar in July - I'm assuming the character counts are similar...? If so, how do you effectively use the Barbri model answers since they're longer than what is permitted? Any advice is much appreciated.

ReasonablePersonSSC

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by ReasonablePersonSSC » Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:23 am

caitlin1016 wrote:I am wondering how people tend to use the Barbri essay answers? I took the Illinois bar and passed with Barbri but the model answers were much longer than the character count permitted in Illinois and I found that frustrating during the actual exam because I hit the character count on every essay. I'm taking the California bar in July - I'm assuming the character counts are similar...? If so, how do you effectively use the Barbri model answers since they're longer than what is permitted? Any advice is much appreciated.
The Cal bar has no limitations on the number of characters used in an essay answer.

caitlin1016

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by caitlin1016 » Tue Jun 04, 2019 8:41 pm

ReasonablePersonSSC wrote:
caitlin1016 wrote:I am wondering how people tend to use the Barbri essay answers? I took the Illinois bar and passed with Barbri but the model answers were much longer than the character count permitted in Illinois and I found that frustrating during the actual exam because I hit the character count on every essay. I'm taking the California bar in July - I'm assuming the character counts are similar...? If so, how do you effectively use the Barbri model answers since they're longer than what is permitted? Any advice is much appreciated.
The Cal bar has no limitations on the number of characters used in an essay answer.
ok thanks I didn't know that since Illinois did

sala5150

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by sala5150 » Tue Jun 04, 2019 9:01 pm

caitlin1016 wrote:I am wondering how people tend to use the Barbri essay answers? I took the Illinois bar and passed with Barbri but the model answers were much longer than the character count permitted in Illinois and I found that frustrating during the actual exam because I hit the character count on every essay. I'm taking the California bar in July - I'm assuming the character counts are similar...? If so, how do you effectively use the Barbri model answers since they're longer than what is permitted? Any advice is much appreciated.

I just passed the CA Bar using the Barbri attorney's course. CA does not have character counts for their essays. CA essays are also long (5 essays, 1 hour each) and necessitate more writing. They tend to be fact heavy and involve a lot of issue spotting. The way I used the barbri answers, which are still much more polished and complete that you can realistically hope for, was to use them as guides and to pull the black letter law from during each practice. Try reading the model answers, isolate the black letter law, and re-type or write the rule statements as you do them. That will help with memorization

caitlin1016

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by caitlin1016 » Fri Jun 07, 2019 2:19 am

I just passed the CA Bar using the Barbri attorney's course. CA does not have character counts for their essays. CA essays are also long (5 essays, 1 hour each) and necessitate more writing. They tend to be fact heavy and involve a lot of issue spotting. The way I used the barbri answers, which are still much more polished and complete that you can realistically hope for, was to use them as guides and to pull the black letter law from during each practice. Try reading the model answers, isolate the black letter law, and re-type or write the rule statements as you do them. That will help with memorization
Ok cool thanks! Do you remember to what extent you re-typed rule statements after looking at the answers versus writing the essays from scratch and then comparing? Or at least outlined first? I know it's not as useful to waste time typing out whole essays if you're a decent writer, but I tend to have a lot of anxiety when I first see an essay prompt, so I'm not sure what the balance should be exactly. But I don't have any issue with writing/bullshitting/structuring essays and have always found writing essays to be the easiest thing for me, so I'm just trying to figure out what the balance should be

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hastingsgal

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by hastingsgal » Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:03 pm

caitlin1016 wrote:
I just passed the CA Bar using the Barbri attorney's course. CA does not have character counts for their essays. CA essays are also long (5 essays, 1 hour each) and necessitate more writing. They tend to be fact heavy and involve a lot of issue spotting. The way I used the barbri answers, which are still much more polished and complete that you can realistically hope for, was to use them as guides and to pull the black letter law from during each practice. Try reading the model answers, isolate the black letter law, and re-type or write the rule statements as you do them. That will help with memorization
Ok cool thanks! Do you remember to what extent you re-typed rule statements after looking at the answers versus writing the essays from scratch and then comparing? Or at least outlined first? I know it's not as useful to waste time typing out whole essays if you're a decent writer, but I tend to have a lot of anxiety when I first see an essay prompt, so I'm not sure what the balance should be exactly. But I don't have any issue with writing/bullshitting/structuring essays and have always found writing essays to be the easiest thing for me, so I'm just trying to figure out what the balance should be
The length of an average passing answer can vary. Look through a variety the real graded essays on BarEssays that scored 65-75 and some are as short as 3 pages long. I saw a 75 that was 2 pages. It all depends on the question of course but for some of them the graders seem to only want you to recognize a few key issues, very good rule statements, but not a ton of analysis.

As far as the models, I agree that they are best used to copy and memorize the rule statements. However, they also tend to be SO long that they are not reflective of the average passing 65 answer. They often include all kinds of minor issues, which makes it hard to figure out the most important issues you need to get a 65.

caitlin1016

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by caitlin1016 » Fri Jun 07, 2019 9:40 pm

yeah I've noticed that. they do a lot of these exceptions do not apply, here they are, blah blah, like crim law and procedure, if the search incident to arrest exception applies, then they list hot pursuit, evanescent evidence, etc. how many points do you actually get for doing that? I was under the impression that listing inapplicable law was not that useful, but perhaps that's not true

sala5150

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by sala5150 » Sat Jun 08, 2019 3:02 am

caitlin1016 wrote:
I just passed the CA Bar using the Barbri attorney's course. CA does not have character counts for their essays. CA essays are also long (5 essays, 1 hour each) and necessitate more writing. They tend to be fact heavy and involve a lot of issue spotting. The way I used the barbri answers, which are still much more polished and complete that you can realistically hope for, was to use them as guides and to pull the black letter law from during each practice. Try reading the model answers, isolate the black letter law, and re-type or write the rule statements as you do them. That will help with memorization
Ok cool thanks! Do you remember to what extent you re-typed rule statements after looking at the answers versus writing the essays from scratch and then comparing? Or at least outlined first? I know it's not as useful to waste time typing out whole essays if you're a decent writer, but I tend to have a lot of anxiety when I first see an essay prompt, so I'm not sure what the balance should be exactly. But I don't have any issue with writing/bullshitting/structuring essays and have always found writing essays to be the easiest thing for me, so I'm just trying to figure out what the balance should be
It changed the more I practiced. I transitioned to writing out my essays longform the closer I got to the exam. It pretty annoying but I think its the best way to actually practice for the real thing. I always outlined the whole essay before I either wrote it out or just wrote out the rules. Outlining was super important for me because it 1) gives you a broad overview of the major points you want to get into your essay so you dont forget them 2) helps you see the logic of the whole essay, which can help you spot something you missed, and 3) keeps you focused on time management, which is a major issue on the CA Exam.

hastingsgal

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by hastingsgal » Sat Jun 08, 2019 2:29 pm

caitlin1016 wrote:yeah I've noticed that. they do a lot of these exceptions do not apply, here they are, blah blah, like crim law and procedure, if the search incident to arrest exception applies, then they list hot pursuit, evanescent evidence, etc. how many points do you actually get for doing that? I was under the impression that listing inapplicable law was not that useful, but perhaps that's not true
This is again the difference between a review course model and a real answer that scored 65+. You do not need to do a "kitchen sink" approach to pass the essay but a lot of the models do that because they are written by several people over a period of days. There is no way you could write 5 model level answers on the bar exam. It's impossible.

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Tony48

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by Tony48 » Sun Jun 09, 2019 2:26 am

I took Florida back in 2017 and used Barbri and also found the model answers to be unnecessarily long-winded, and it's basically impossible to model YOUR answer after Barbri's under timed conditions. I modeled my answers after my jurisdictions officially released model answers. They were more reasonable in length than Barbri's, while still giving a complete, comprehensive answer. If your jurisdiction releases essay answers, I'd use those.

hastingsgal

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by hastingsgal » Sun Jun 09, 2019 2:48 am

Tony48 wrote:I took Florida back in 2017 and used Barbri and also found the model answers to be unnecessarily long-winded, and it's basically impossible to model YOUR answer after Barbri's under timed conditions. I modeled my answers after my jurisdictions officially released model answers. They were more reasonable in length than Barbri's, while still giving a complete, comprehensive answer. If your jurisdiction releases essay answers, I'd use those.
The problem in California is that the officially released answers are basically the same as review course models. There's a video floating around of the former head of the CA state bar saying they hurt people more than they help because they are unrealistic and often written by supreme court clerks or long-time professionals in the field taking the attorney exam or people that spend 2 hours on 1 essay.

caitlin1016

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Re: Barbri Essay Answers

Post by caitlin1016 » Sun Jun 09, 2019 5:23 am

for someone who tends to write A LOT (ideally and usually in a concise form), is it more useful to do the kitchen sink approach to an extent or to delve more deeply into the analysis
i know what i did in illinois but not sure if california differs

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