Pass the Bar by Being Aware of Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Apologies for the length, this is probably my first time actually reflecting on my prep lol

Using my bar prep’s / school’s recommended study methods (until about 3 weeks before) instead of what I used for all of college and law school. For example, I rarely used flash cards before, I always learned rules by drilling practice questions and coming up with my own version of a rule statement that was easier for me to remember and would get me to the same conclusion, but both my bar prep and school said I should be doing x number of flashcards per day so that’s what I did.

I was meeting regularly with my school’s bar prep office and once I hit 70% on MBE (about 6 weeks before the bar) they told me to heavily reduce the number of MBE I was doing and focus on essays. This caused 2 issues: once I stopped drilling MBE as much, my scores basically stopped improving, I was never getting above 75-80%; also, my essays were always going to be my weaker area, so instead of just being okay with 55/60 and trying to secure a high MBE I was spending a lot of time (and frustration) submitting practice essays that still rarely got to a 65. At this time I was probably 90/10 on time spent on essays vs MBE.

About 3 weeks before the exam I realized this was not going to work. I went back to doing 50/50 essays/MBE and within a week my MBEs jumped to 80-90%+ and my essays were still staying around 55/60 (with PT consistently 65). Obviously it’s too early to know if this worked, but if I had to guess I think my essays were in the 55-65 range and my MBE in 75-85%; if I had stayed 90/10 essays/MBE I think I would have maybe been more 60-65 but MBE would have likely been around 65-75%.

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Honestly if I pass I think pure luck is part of it (which people probably don’t want to hear haha). On essays I tend to struggle with topics that have a large number of elements or exceptions (trust creation, hearsay, etc.); I’m fine with the analysis but actually remembering the elements so I can do the analysis is harder for me. I felt like these essays didn’t require a huge amount of rule recall so there were just fewer opportunities for me to drop rules and therefore points. It’s hard for me to assess how I did, maybe 50/50 on passing, but there was definitely a combination of essays, PT, and MBE out there that I would have come out being 90% confident I did not pass.

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Tripod approach. That was maybe the biggest shift in how I approached my last 3 weeks of study. I was STEM undergrad and am very numbers-minded so early on in the process when I asked my school’s bar prep office what was a reasonable max score for me to aim for on the MBE and how would that affect the minimum score I needed on essays they were basically like “there’s no way to know, you just have to get a 67% on MBE and a 65 on all essays”. Once I really started to panic and re-assess about 3 weeks before the exam, I found your page on the tripod approach and realized that maxing my scores on MBE/PT/PR wouldn’t guarantee a pass but would make it more likely than staying at my 70% MBE and praying I could raise all my essays to a 65 in time.

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If I have to retake, I think it will be because my non-PR essays were very low, 45-55. If that is the case, I think I would have passed if I had spent the entire 8 weeks of bar prep using my preferred study methods instead of only the last 3. If scores come back and it was my PR/PT/MBE that was the issue then I’ll need to significantly change my approach on those for next time.

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I think just being kind to myself and my abilities. Some days I could knock out 10-12 hours no problem, some days after 2 hours I was completely drained. I think just waking up and accepting that there was only so much I was going to accomplish that day kept me grounded and gave me reasonable expectations for where I was going to be by the time I took the exam.

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I think a lot of things from the website also show up in various reddit threads, but it was helpful having them all in once place.

I wanted to let you know that I passed in CA!

I also wanted to say that MTYLT was the only program that made me feel like I was in control of how exam day would go and that it was okay to ditch my commercial and school bar prep plans and study in a way that worked for me.

MTYLT was a huge help, especially around 3 weeks out when I realized I probably was not going to pass unless I made some major changes. I think I filled out the post-bar survey so I won’t repeat everything (and don’t feel like you have to read this entire email lol), but basically I was in a spot where my MBE (AdaptiBar) had plateaued around 75%, but I was also having a lot of difficulty retaining rule statements (especially those with multiple elements). I used Helix for bar prep and thought it was helpful enough, but obviously at 3 weeks to the exam date, the “tasks” for each day were just generally reviewing all subjects and I felt that I was making little to no progress. Additionally, my school had a bar prep “schedule” for those last 3 weeks but it was largely based on your MBE scores (under 60, prioritize MBE; 60-70 spend equal time; 70+, prioritize essays), and I felt that I had already been prioritizing my essays but was forgetting rule statements as fast I was learning them.

I’m not sure how I found MTYLT but the google search was probably something like “how to pass CA Bar with bad essays”  and your page on the tripod approach totally changed my study plan. At that point, I was probably only spending an hour a day on MBEs and just trying to “maintain” my 75%, but I realized that if I spent a little more time on those and managed to bring up my score 5 or 10 percent it could give me a lot more flexibility in my essay scores. That combined with increasing my focus on PR and PT made me feel like for the first time during bar prep that I was in control of how exam day would go. I felt pretty confident that if I could get to 80% on MBE, and 65s on PR and PT, I had more room to perform less well on the other essays.

So my typical 8-hour study day went from:

• MBE – 1 hour
• PR – 1 hour
• Other Essays – 6 hours
• 1 PT / week

to:

• MBE – 2+ hours
• PR – 2 hours
• PT – 1 hour
• Other Essays – 3 hours

Unsurprisingly, my other essays didn’t really improve, but at the end of the first week I had already increased my MBE to 80%, was spotting almost all the issues on PR and able to get rule statements down for most of them, and could pretty quickly identify what the PT was asking for and how my response should be structured. This trend continued and at the end of the next week (1 week from the exam), my MBE was consistently 90% and I felt very confident on PR and PT. This allowed me to spend the final week mostly studying the other highly tested topics so I could at least recognize the issues and write a somewhat correct rule statement.

Obviously I’ll never know what my score was (my MBE score advisory was the 150), but walking out of the exam I felt that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was close to what I was aiming for (80%+ MBE and 65+ PR/PT, with essays in the 50-60 range).

There were a lot of other MTYLT resources that I used and found very helpful, but just having someone tell me that it was okay to ditch my commercial and school bar prep plans and study in a way that worked for me was more helpful than anything else I did this summer.

I don’t think I ended up buying any of the study tools, but would love to support your site if you ever start doing Buy Me a Coffee or Patreon (or just drop the venmo haha).

Thanks again!

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Sorry for the delayed response; nothing specifically stands out but I feel like I kept going back to the “Start Here” page and going through the links (so I guess for sure “My 5 Rules for Passing the MBE” and “How to Systematically Identify Issues in an Essay”) as well as most of the pages linked under “Resources”. I guess one thing I’ll add is that “Analyzing Your Score Report” is mostly targeted at re-takers but I think it’s also really helpful for people on their first time. I also think the “How Do Grading and Scoring Work for the California Bar Exam?” could be linked on the “Start Here” page (if it’s not already and I just missed it) for CA takers.