Stop “Studying” and Start Learning: The Underrated Practice of Practice in Bar Prep

You’ve sat still during lectures and tried to stay awake. You’ve taken notes. You’ve read outlines. You’ve even answered practice questions.

Then nothing works. Has this happened to you?

Back in college, I gave a copy of my cheat sheet for our engineering midterm to a girl. How do you say no to a girl? Answer: You can’t.

And then she got the lowest score in the class.

It had all the equations needed, but she didn’t know how and when those equations applied. She hadn’t seen those rules applied to similar problems. She assumed that just having the rules there would be enough. (Same reason open-book bar exams would change very little.)

It’s like when someone says, “b urself” or “learn to love yourself.” Okay… what’s that mean? Could you explain that a bit more, bro? Any specifics?

Same with your “black letter law”… What does “related” mean in your rule statement?

You get a better sense of what that means in the context of examples of how that rule is used. You gain an intuition.

You’d think these rules would be plug and play, but they’re not always. Context matters. Knowing when and how to use them matters.

“Do I really know this? Am I really becoming ready for the bar exam?”

It’s natural to question yourself at every step when preparing for the bar exam.

What people try to do:

• Consume material to cover all the subjects first
• Obsess over every rule and get overwhelmed
• Collect more tools than is feasible to look at and reconcile
• Endlessly seek the “best” silver-bullet tool
• Fill in the available time

This is when we pour our coffee, make room on our desk, organize our pens, turn on the computer… and then just stare at the words and ask for “tips” from random people online who have no idea about our situation.

Tedium and busy work feel productive. They aren’t actually productive.

Endlessly getting ready is really just a distraction away from what it is we already know we need to do.

How to actually find out:

• Apply what you learned as you go (you find out exactly what you need to brush up on vs. trying to re-review everything)
• Set up the issues in an essay (they will lead to rules)
• Study what’s been done in model answers (don’t reinvent the wheel)
• Simplify (get an outline or two; tack on other tools as you need)
• Plan around tasks to be done (constraints force you to get creative and focused with your time)

It’s not putting in the time by itself that makes you better. It’s about how many experiments you do. Improvement comes from constant feedback and learning every time you try to solve a difficult problem.

Apply pressure to your mind rather than trying to make it as painless as possible. Compared to trying to juggle all the mass of information or predict what’s going to happen, it’s actually less exhausting and more enjoyable and motivating to solve questions.

This way, you naturally find out what is worth remembering since you’ll see those issues and rules more frequently.

Everything you get wrong while TRYING can be a lesson you carry over to future instances

This seems obvious enough. Why aren’t more bar takers doing this?

• Why be overly concerned with memorizing (over recalling and applying rules and issues)?
• Why focus on sheer quantity of questions (over reviewing answers carefully and perhaps redoing them)?
• Why suffer through assignments handed down from a cookie-cutter program (that goes offline when you’re in the middle of using it) and complain about how it barely moves the completion meter?

🚨 If this seems obvious to you, common sense is not common action. We don’t do the things we know. We do things we have done before.

It sucks when the time comes to check your answers. You get anxious. You can’t bring yourself to turn to the answer key.

It feels safer to do what we’re familiar with. It’s hard to empathize with your future self when you could avoid blows to your ego right now.

But these are “aha” moments that stick with you the most. Embarrassment is the best way I’ve found to learn a lesson. Bar preparation is emotional preparation.

Are you here to pretend to be prepared or actually become prepared?

A key to success on the bar exam is to fail first

No one gets a perfect score on the bar exam. Therefore, everyone fails to some extent. Passers simply fail less over time.

In a situation where opportunities to test yourself like practice questions are abundant, I think it’s more exciting to fail. Every failure comes with valuable data for next time. If you’re scoring too high too early, you may not be failing enough.

A great irony is that we crave honesty from others but are afraid of giving it to them (or doing the mental labor of making it palatable). Oftentimes, people will tell you a good reason but not the real reason.

That’s completely useless except to our egos. Honesty is one of the great generosities we can offer others—and to ourselves. (But you’re doing it wrong if you have to tell them, “I’m just being honest!”)

Get things wrong. Wrong answers you encounter during bar practice are incredibly valuable. Once you know the truth, you can fix it.

That’s why you should be brutally honest with yourself and your practice efforts:

• What did you get wrong? What did you get right?
• What will you try to remember next time?
• What can you change?

So many questions. Think of it this way:

After 51 failed games, Rovio created the mega-hit game series Angry Birds.

Remember: “The more you die, the more you’re learning.”

And “You have to kill a lot of plants to be an expert.”

Whatever you’re about to do can’t be worse than not seeing your name on the pass list… and the trauma that closes in around you each time that happens.

I, too, was a struggling bar taker once (and a repeater)! Nothing made sense, and I was EXHAUSTED from forcing myself to do things that were NOT helping me LEARN.

Turns out it was LESS exhausting to do what was helping me progress, engaging in trial and error, and feeling like I could do something next time that I couldn’t do before.

My main problems with my failed California bar attempt according to my score report: essays, raising issues correctly, and the MBE somewhat. Hell, everything was substandard:

(FYI, in California, an average raw written score of about 62.5 historically allowed one to be on track to get to the passing 1440 scaled score (back in 2013), assuming the MBE score was also on track. The thing to note here is that my written score was over 100 points away from that.)

The unifying cause of these problems:

Like a lot of people, I was just going through the motions of “studying”…

• Dutifully watching lectures
• Filling in lecture notes
• Reading outlines in exhaustive detail
• Showing off my “stressful” life to other people
• Following the schedule and regimen my prep company gave me to a T (Kaplan, I’m throwing you under the bus)

We’re not here to transcribe overpriced lectures!

Looking back, it wasn’t very thoughtful or intentional. None of this was helping me “learn.” I merely became familiar with the concepts.

It just felt nice, like getting likes on social media. And it was just as meaningless. Empty calories to fill the void. Wheels moving but spinning in place. I got stuck on a plateau.

You may “know” the rules in theory, but will you know when to apply which ones or how to raise legal issues? Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad (mostly because tomatoes are gross).

Studying vs. learning

Knowledge doesn’t give you experience or intuition.

It’s so easy to read a rule statement and think, “Great, got it, that’s how an offer works, duh.”

It’s a different story to know when to use that rule and how to use it.

On the other hand, it turns out practicing and self-critiquing your work help you accomplish everything you seek:

• Getting better at identifying issues
• Memorizing rules through active recall
• Knowing how to apply the rules you memorized
• Picking the right answer on the MBE
• Remembering the most frequent (and thus important) issues and rules
• Gaining confidence

Studying for the bar exam isn’t just about “studying”; it’s about preparation.

That involves practicing as if it were the real thing, and doing the real thing as if it were practice.

Even then, what good is practice if you don’t learn anything from it? You might as well not have done it at all.

You might be getting spooked by all this, but it’s actually a simple fix (even if uncomfortable): Self-critique and check your work.

If you’re doing questions and seeing if you got the right answer/issues/rules but not doing anything about it, that’s busy work. That’s simply measuring your current skill level—like getting on the scale, getting off, and getting right back on again hoping to see improvement.

In other words, practicing and reviewing your work will help solidify everything, including memorizing, understanding, and retaining the important concepts likely to be tested.

Once I figured that out… Now THAT was exciting.

It’s only obvious in hindsight because you’re surrounded by your own uncertainties and overwhelm.

Forging a path for yourself

By default, you look toward the big course for any sort of structure and guidance… It can serve a purpose at first, but you eventually outgrow it.

Your job on the hot seat is to solve problems correctly, not just be familiar with things.

So stop studying, and start learning. Attempt to solve problems now and proactively learn from your experience. 

By seeing the simple path toward learning and retention (Practice + Feedback), you can develop the confidence to push through and free yourself from the shackles of a cookie-cutter schedule.

You already know what you should do. You just have to get started.

You won’t always be ready with perfect information, but you can learn it by attempting to use it anyway and filling in the gaps afterward. Using your knowledge tells you what you’re missing.

“No prize fighter can go with high spirits into the strife if he has never been beaten black and blue. The only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fists, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary’s charge, who has been downed in body, but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.”—Seneca

You either learn or succeed. Don’t let the bar be a learning experience.