After results for the 2020 October California Bar Exam came out, my inboxes were flooded with over 100 messages and DMs.
I individually responded to almost all of those over the course of a week and a half. It’s part of a post-mortem ritual that involves celebrating my community’s wins, greeting new readers and followers, and commiserating with the reality some have to face.
One of the messages was from Tracy, who was completely overwhelmed as she planned to take the next exam (text version below):
All good things to do. But that’s simply being a consumer. It feels like progress.
Being merely familiar with something or being able to recognize it—even being able to recite a rule statement—doesn’t mean you can USE it.
Just because you love reading books or watching videos doesn’t mean you’re going to make a good creative. You have to keep putting work out there under the eyes of scrutiny.
Can you recall the issues and rules?
Can you pick out the correct answer (for the right reason)?
Can you identify all the relevant issues by looking at a fact pattern?
Can you organize an answer for an essay or a performance test?
Can you write out an answer in time?
That’s being a producer. That’s what you’ll do on the bar exam. That’s what the bar exam will ask you to do: to know HOW TO USE your knowledge to solve problems.
Consuming only prepares you to do the work that matters. It’s not the main thing to focus on.
It’s harder to test yourself with a question, take way longer than it should, and realize you don’t know how to answer it.
That’s what preparation is for… so that doesn’t happen while you’re on the hot seat.
When you’re actually on the hotseat, you’re automatically less good at the things you’re normally good at on a day-to-day basis.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.”
I don’t want you to find out that you actually weren’t training well as you fall to its level on the real thing. Instead, I want you to pass the MBE (and the bar exam) with flying colors.
To that end, here are my five rules for passing the MBE:
It became possible to take the bar exam remotely—from anywhere on the planet—thanks to the miracle of high-speed Internet. It’s the bandwidth revolution! The Great Reset!
But with new ideas come poo-poo-ers.
People were complaining about how it won’t work, they’re going to spy on us through the camera, there aren’t any bathroom breaks in the middle of a session, there will be tech issues, there are hackers, people will cheat, it’s too complicated, etc.
But just because something is uncertain or new doesn’t mean it’s always bad. (Remember when people complained when Facebook kept changing its interface and got used to it within a day?)
There are a lot of resources and supplements for the MBE portion of the bar exam these days.
You’re bombarded with referral links and ads from all angles on the Internet these days thanks to everyone trying to get a piece of you (and your sneaky iPhone listening to everything you think).
You’re taking the most important exam of your life. The multiple-choice part counts for 50% of your bar exam score based on a series of 200 letters (or 100 if there’s a pandemic).
All you want is just some solid and cost-effective help that makes you actually learn and progress.
What are you supposed to choose?
UWorld MBE QBank is a new contender to the MBE game.
In this comprehensive review of UWorld, I’ll explain what their MBE QBank does and why I immediately reached out when I first heard about it from my readers.
One key distinction about UWorld’s MBE platform is that it comes with visual, intuitive answer explanations. Answer explanations with illustrations, charts, and other visual aids can help you retain and recall the rules. A picture is worth a thousand words, or at least a lot of words. And we already have enough words to read as it is.
Here are some key takeaways and a table of contents for more details:
