“R” passed the 2024 February California Bar Exam on her second try. She had some obstacles on her first attempt…
💬 “J23 bar exam, I wasn’t able to study because of personal reasons.”
💬 “That was something I felt in J23, I was not physically prepared to take the bar exam.”
💬 “I have an engineering background, so law school was a whole different beast for me! I was very near the bottom of my class in law school. My STEM brain found it hard to grasp the way of thinking like a lawyer!”
R had a similar background as mine. Coming from a STEM background, law school was a struggle for me as well.
But once it clicks, it clicks. And it only needs to click once before you can go out there and start your career.
In my case, failing the exam was a huge shock that finally unlocked the part of my brain to figure out this bar thing. That must have been some trauma to keep me on this crusade 10 years later.
Here’s what R (and I) did on our second attempts so you don’t have to traumatize yourself…
“There were no surprises. I just knew the issue clusters. I knew the law cold. I knew the answers. The exam days were like break days compared to my practice days!”
Resources used to pass the California Bar Exam
▶ Magicsheets
▶ Passer’s Playbook
▶ AdaptiBar for the MBE
▶ BarEssays [CA only]
Use these codes to save on AdaptiBar and BarEssays.
4 lessons that are fundamental to passing the bar exam
Even if you’re not an engineering student, you can:
- Engineer the way you optimize knowledge accrual
- Get to the final solution of passing the bar exam
- Without having to pay for any course
1) Be the dean of your own studies.
What does it mean to be the dean of your own studies?
We assume that taking a huge course is the default way (or even the only way) to study for the bar exam. No wonder—because Barbri, Themis, and Kaplan gang up on you as soon as you step foot onto law school.
When you plan a trip, would you sort your flights by expensive first-class tickets by default? (Let’s keep in touch if you do.)
Sure, it may be more comfortable at the front of the plane, but you get to the same destination regardless of where you sit.
A bar review course does provide great materials and an organized structure. It gives you fancy video lectures and a stock schedule that aims to cover everything equally for everyone regardless of situation. It can work for the common denominator. It may not work for you.
R realized that it wasn’t working for her.
💬 “Something you said really stuck with me. You said that I am the dean of my own bar prep. This really helped me since within the first couple weeks of F24 bar prep, I realized that Barbri was not working for me. So I stopped doing it altogether. Not to undermine Barbri and its efficacy, it just wasn’t well suited to my learning style.”
Bar preparation is ultimately a self-study endeavor. Supplements, tools, and yes, courses, are simply there to support your self-learning efforts.
Your bar review course doesn’t know what you need, so YOU decide what you should do to be learning. Cater to your unique needs. Develop your own curriculum. That’s being the dean of your own studies.
That might involve doing some of what the course suggests, so I’m not saying to abandon your course completely. But that’s what it is—a suggestion.
Be conscious of what you need by questioning whether what you’re doing makes sense to you:
- Does the cookie-cutter schedule work for you?
- Do you really need to sit through three days of lectures to reintroduce a subject you know well?
- Are you an auditory learner? Or do you learn better by reading the rules and solving example questions?
You can also look back to your law school days for clues.
2) Create your own study schedule.
Part of designing your curriculum is designing your own study schedule.
💬 “For F24, a colleague recommended MTYLT and MagicSheets. I also got the Passers Playbook. There are so many good exemplary study schedules in the Playbook, and it was very helpful for me to create my own schedule.”
You could absolutely follow a course’s prescribed schedule. But I think it’s better to plan based on what makes sense to you personally. You could even use other schedules as inspiration, like R did.
Why should you wrack your head over this? Isn’t it reinventing the wheel?
In a prescribed schedule, if you have a personal event one weekend or even a lunch with a friend, you’ll fall behind. It’s packed and not flexible.
You might have overwhelming tasks one day and vague directions another day. In the first place, it’s unclear whether it will be effective for you when they’re giving everyone the same schedule.
What if you could have more control over your fate? What if you’re the sort of person who wants to work smarter and not just harder?
You don’t have to leave life in limbo while you prepare for the bar. You can build in buffer days. You can decide to take Sundays off. You can design your prep around days you know you’ll be somewhere else.
You shouldn’t slave over your schedule. Rather, your schedule should be a flexible document that fits you like a handmade glove and caters to your needs to help you navigate through this big project.
Here’s how to get started on creating your personalized study plan.
3) Learn how you’ll be tested on the bar exam through active studying.
Under all the pressure and overwhelm of materials to know, it can be tempting to make sure you “get all your ducks in a row” first.
Reading outlines, watching videos, memorizing, consuming.
They’re “passive” ways to study. These are necessary activities in your bar preparation.
But just because you know some words on a page doesn’t necessarily mean your body knows what to do with it. Knowing the law is different from knowing how to USE the law.
How do you learn how to use it?
R focused most of her efforts on practicing past exam questions. This is a lesson that many repeaters learn, so here’s your crystal ball…
💬 “For F24, I practiced 6-7 essay outlining/cooking from baressays.com and 34 MCQ (timed 1 hour) from Adaptibar daily, and 1 PT every 2-3 days, and reviewed everything with the model and high scoring answers from baressays.com and Adaptibar. The goal was to make sure that I knew the law cold.”
What did she do?
- Daily MBE questions
- Enough essay questions to cover testable issues (I suggest 10 per subject if you want to be sure)
- PTs every 2-3 days
💬 “In total, I practiced close to a 100 essay outlines closed book, and 1400 Adaptibar questions. My Adaptibar score during the last two weeks before the bar was 78-84%.”
That’s a good number of questions. It’s not as many as some I’ve seen.
But ask yourself what’s stopping you from doing it now. I’d like you to comment below if you feel this block so I can hear your reason and help you overcome that resistance.
Here’s a recent user of Passer’s Playbook who just started preparing for her exam. She found out why passive studying is a trap after developing her personalized schedule and starting to practice early.
R would probably agree:
💬 “My advice is to start practicing essay outlining and MCQ closed-book as early as possible. You will never feel ready. At least I didn’t. It is intimidating to start closed book essays, but, as you said, it is better to miss the issues at home during practice than in the actual bar exam. Everytime I felt intimidated to start a closed-book essay practice, I reminded myself that I would rather make the mistakes and miss issues during prep than in the actual exam.”
If it were me, I’d make sure to do more than just “doing questions.” I’d also study the sample answers and cross-reference with outlines to secure my understanding of what’s being tested. This part is at least as important as measuring your performance by solving questions.
The more you engage with the material, the more active your study is and the better prepared you’ll be.
What else did R do in her practice regimen?
💬 “I rotated through all the subjects multiple times so that I did not have any weak subjects. Soon I started seeing patterns in the questions being tested. There are only so many ways they can test you.”
This is exactly what I suggest in the scheduling guidelines in Passer’s Playbook. You can specify which subjects you address and how often you visit them. There is a difference in how well you retain something depending on when you study it.
4) Minimize surprises.
Notice what R said above: “There are only so many ways they can test you.”
In Passer’s Playbook, I say that becoming bored is a good thing. The weakness of the bar exam is that there’s only a finite number of ways they can test you.
When it becomes so predictable and routine that you become bored, you move away from being lost, scared, and stressed. All that’s left is to move your fingers while sighing, “Here we go again.”
💬 “I just did not want to have any surprises. I had prepared my body for months to sleep early and wake up early, and to be able to take the physical strain of the bar exam, sitting in the same seat for hours on end doing hard mental-gymnastics! That was something I felt in J23, I was not physically prepared to take the bar exam.”
In fact, for R, this became second nature through practice. She knew the issues (not just rules) cold, like the back of her hand.
💬 “But in F24, I thought of what you said., “You go in the hall like you own it and scoop up points.” And scooping I did. There were no surprises. I just knew the issue clusters. I knew the law cold. I knew the answers. The exam days were like break days compared to my practice days! I knew I had passed the moment I stopped typing and filling in those bubbles.”
To be clear, there will be at least one question that throws you off and makes you almost utter WTF in the middle of the exam.
But you can minimize those surprises. That’s the purpose of preparation.
R did preparation right and was rewarded for her tailored approach.
Great job, R! Here are the resources she used.
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