Brian, Author at Make This Your Last Time

October 20, 2019March 28, 2023 - 3 Comments

How a repeater with a 9% chance of passing crushed the California Bar Exam… while working full time

Samantha was a “threepeater” who took the California Bar Exam three times. She wasn’t sure she’d pass. To say that the odds were not in her favor would be an understatement.

Having gone to a non-accredited law school with a 9 PERCENT CHANCE of passing for repeaters, she wasn’t sure she’d pass. The exam she took also had a 40% pass rate, the lowest it’s ever been for a July bar exam in California. On top of that, she had caretaker duties and worked full time.

WHAT⁉🤯

💬 “I wasn’t confident at all. I was a hundred percent certain I had failed it. . . . I went to a non-ABA accredited law school. Our regular pass rate is like 16% and for retakers is like 9%.”

Her Achilles’ heel was her low MBE score. On top of that, the California Bar Exam had just increased the weight of the MBE to 50%, making it that much harder for Samantha to kind of overcome the challenge with the MBE.

💬 “My essays were 1570 and my MBEs were 1280. And then the second time, my MBEs came up by 20 points, but my MBE raw score breakdowns were awful both times.”

She knew practicing was important. But it’s not all about the quantity.

💬 “The first time I did almost 5,000 MBE questions. And I failed, and it was awful.”

October 1, 2019March 28, 2023 - No Comments

This foreign attorney who struggled with essays passed the California Bar Exam with the lowest July pass rate (40%)

Lars was a Canadian attorney taking the California Bar Exam. He took it once in 2018 February. Then he passed the following July.

“I took it twice. The first time was in February and I got 1393, and then I wrote again in July and passed the second time.”

Lars was decent enough on the MBE and the PT thanks to his existing lawyering skills, but he needed help with the essays.

“I came really close on the MBE the first time. I think I missed one question but I struggled with the essays. I did well on the PT, the first time, which I think I can attribute to being a lawyer.”

Unlike the MBE and the PT, essays force you to work your “origination muscle”—to come up with words to write (instead of filling in letters) based on what you’ve memorized. We can break it down to a three-step process: Memorize the law, be able to recall it, and able to apply it.

“I kind of thought going in the first time, I would be able to just sort of manage the essays better than I could. . . . As a whole, the issue with the grading of the papers, there is a real issue where I don’t feel like a lot of the graders are grading equally.”

September 21, 2019August 6, 2024 - 7 Comments

Why Are Pass Rates Lower in February than in July? (Yours Doesn’t Have to Be)

Bar exam takers are some of the most anxious and superstitious people on the planet.

They spend more time agonizing over which subjects will be tested than actually preparing for each subject (…and then get really mad when the subjects actually get leaked, like they did for the California Bar Exam in 2019)
They plug numbers into score calculators to figure out how many wrong MBE answers they can get away with… AFTER the bar (I’m also guilty of this)
They get worked up over the smallest indications of possibly passing the bar (“My account won’t let me sign up for the next bar exam! My character and fitness status is different! There’s some text that changed colors! I “hacked” my account and read HTML markup and my tea leaves just moved on their own! Does this mean I passed the bar?! Do they even have my answers???”)

It wouldn’t surprise me if someone used a ouija board to divine what a magic 8-ball would say about their bar results.

I’m only judging a little bit because it’s natural to get anxious over a high-stakes exam. But we sometimes focus on minutiae too much that ultimately doesn’t matter.

One such question that some repeaters (or first timers who don’t take it in July) have is whether they should take the bar in February or July. The lingering concern is whether the bar is harder in February than in July. Is it really?

This is an understandable question but one that you need not worry about too much.

July 6, 2019January 11, 2022 - 6 Comments

“Bar Exam Literacy”: How to Cure Uncertainty in Bar Preparation

Hello? Can you read this? You’re all good if you’re literate with the written word—my favorite way to communicate and same with the bar examiners.

You may be literate in many other ways: digital literacy, media literacy, critical literacy, financial literacy…

Yeah, I’m proud of us, too. But I want to talk about “bar exam literacy.”

You’re capable of graduating from law school, you survived all those exams, you may be up to date on developments in case law, etc.

But you’ve noticed by now that the bar exam is a different beast altogether.

You may have had moments of panic… that sinking feeling in your chest that you might be spinning your wheels… a feeling of dread you haven’t felt since you sent the wrong text to the wrong person.

First of all, it’s normal to feel uncertain about the bar. Second, that uncertainty can be cured.

June 29, 2019May 20, 2023 - 3 Comments

How Do You Even Know You’re Practicing Correctly for Bar Prep?

They tell you to “study,” but do they ever teach you HOW to study? Are you studying correctly? Of course bar takers get lost when there are so many different ways to go about preparing.

You could try everything yourself, or you could find a few trustworthy sources and ignore the noise. You could pinpoint insights rather than cobble together information from random people with their own views (bar prep is personal).

Why?

Too much conflicting information actually STOPS you from doing anything.
I want the right insights, not just information. The information doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as it makes sense to me and gets me to do something about it.
The more I respect the insight, the more likely I am to do something with it.

How do you know whether to trust someone? Trust yourself to know.

Some resources and advice will work for others, and some will work for you. Big bar review courses cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s like Olive Garden’s menu where there’s something for everyone but also the primary ingredient for everything is butter.