Saurabh attempted the California Bar Exam three times since 2019. Then he passed the 2024 July exam.
💬 “This was my third attempt.
2019 was first. Which I had combined with another trip I had to take to US.
Then covid happened and there was a gap and I was not confident about exam prep.
Plus full time job. I gave again in July 2023, where I scored pretty close to passing.”
How did he manage to pass this time?
There are clear themes that you’ll find useful whether you’re a first timer or especially if you’re a repeater.
- Resources Saurabh used to pass the California Bar Exam
- Two themes I want to highlight
- Deep understanding of testable questions
- Consistent practice and reinforcement to do the real thing like practice
- Learn by example
- Redo questions
- Practice as if it were the real thing
- Do the real thing as if it were practice
- Results speak for themselves
- Full story
💬 “This exam, in my opinion, is not about how much you know the law. It’s about practice.”
Resources Saurabh used to pass the California Bar Exam
💬 “Magicsheets were important to check if I had captured everything.”
💬 “Your Approsheets … were helpful for mapping out the essays. The flowchart could be used to map out every single essay.”
💬 “Your material was go-to for me. Every line was a heading for which I must know a paragraph.”
▶ AdaptiBar (use promo code here to get 10% off your entire cart)
▶ Past essay questions and performance tests (CA and UBE questions included)
▶ Barbri
▶ Mary Basick’s books: Essay Exam Writing for the California Bar Exam, California Performance Test Workbook, and The MBE Decoded
Two themes I want to highlight
- Get to know the questions and the exam.
- Fight for simplicity (not ease).
Deep understanding of testable questions
To be able to answer questions correctly on the exam, you have to get to know the questions ahead of time.
It’s almost like they tell you what’s going to be on the exam by making practice questions available! (That’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.)
So build a thorough understanding of exam questions and how to answer them.
How?
Saurabh emphasized not merely knowing the law but understanding the intricacies of each question. He even considered hypothetical changes to the questions to see how that would change the answer.
💬 “MBE – I targeted doing 50 questions a day. I used AdaptiBar. The way I did the MBE questions was to totally understand the question. And what would change in the question, so that the wrong answer choice would then be correct. I would also try to understand the logic of the examiner why they chose to include a specific choice as a wrong answer.”
Now that’s what I call engaging with the material! This allowed him to truly recognize the logic behind correct and incorrect answers.
💬 “I tried to understand the logic of the examiner why they chose to include a specific choice as a wrong answer.”
Saurabh didn’t limit himself to AdaptiBar questions. He also used Barbri’s questions to check his knowledge.
💬 “I found the Barbri questions very very good. They were not ‘practice questions’ rather they were ‘knowledge questions.’”
Bar courses don’t need to be strictly avoided. Rather, use them (or not) to your benefit if you decide to enroll in one.
How can you use the resources out there?
Consistent practice and reinforcement to do the real thing like practice
You knew I was going to mention this, but what can I say? All these passers are the ones telling me about it.
The exam becomes predictable when you expose yourself to past exam questions because the scope of the test is limited to that universe.
💬 “The bar exam repeats many many questions across different exams. I would assume almost 80-90% of the questions asked, either in essays or MBEs have already been asked in the previous exams.
For example, there are only so many ways one can ask a negligence question.”
Learn by example
Do whatever helps you see examples—over and over. You learn best by example, not by theory. It’s how you become better. And competence leads to confidence.
💬 “This exam, in my opinion, is not about how much you know the law. It’s about practice. The more you practice, the better you become.”
💬 “By the time I was finished with it, I became so good at it, I could figure out which is an NCBE question and which is a hypothetical question from bar prep companies.”
💬 “Every single Barbri essay follows a certain format. I tried to understand that format. There are 8 essays per subject in Barbri. And there are 13 subjects. So about 108 essays, and all the essays in the Mary Basick book.”
Saurabh also made sure he didn’t miss a testable issue by going through his outline and notes to cover his bases.
💬 “I used the materials as a revision source. Is there a line in the notes, on which I have not done an essay or an MBE question? If yes, then my learning was incomplete.”
Redo questions
As I mention in Passer’s Playbook, redoing questions is an underrated way to check and solidify your understanding.
You don’t have the right to say you understand a question if you can’t answer it correctly later.
Repeating is how you lock things into memory, even the name of that random person you met at the holiday party.
💬 “For MBE- one must know the law, and that happens only by redoing the same thing again and again.”
💬 “I would regularly revise the notes, when the question for the notes were still fresh in memory. Later in the week, I would then redo these 50 questions again. Deliberately re-reading the question, and the answer choice and working in my mind, why an answer choice in wrong and why an answer choice is right.”
Practice as if it were the real thing
Understand how mentally and physically demanding the exam is.
💬 “The exam is really long, 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon.”
To manage exam day conditions, part of Saurabh’s “practice” was to simulate exam conditions, even the length of time he’d need to focus.
So Saurabh got used to practicing in long sessions similar to the exam to train himself to maintain focus and endurance.
💬 “A baseball player cannot play football. Football is continuously running for the duration of the game.
MBE is like football. Brain gets tired if not practiced. I used to study in 3 hours session. It was difficult at first, but later I got used to it. So when giving the MBE, I was as fresh on the 100th question as I was in the 1st. That was also important.”
He also prioritized the Tripod, which in California includes the performance test and the Professional Responsibility essay. (How would you triage if you were taking the UBE or a state-specific exam?)
💬 “Professional responsibility – I knew this subject is going to come. So for that reason, I did extra practice of this subject.”
💬 “Performance test. – this was my weakest point of the exam. I had spent so much time learning the law and practicing the essay that there was not much time left for performance test.”
💬 “As a strategy, to be able to attend the question with a fresh mind, I attempted the PT and PR questions first before the other essays.”
Do the real thing as if it were practice
You might say, “Why bother? Isn’t this just becoming familiar with the questions?”
YES DUDE NOW YOU’RE GETTING IT. The entire point of bar preparation is to be able to mimic the exam during practice so you can mimic practice on the real thing.
Questions and fact patterns and issue patterns should look very familiar to you on the exam, at least for some of them. But it would be hard to be ready for absolutely every issue and rule. By being stable and confidence in a majority of the testable material, you can focus on the questions that throw you off.
Regularly doing and redoing practice questions helps you to internalize the material and be ready for what the test might throw at you.
Results speak for themselves
From all this, Saurabh’s scores would become good at this bar thing. Like really good.
💬 “By the time I was done with my MBE preparation, even on a really bad day, I would score about 80-85% marks.”
💬 “Even now, I can give the MBE again, and I would not score anything less than 90-95%. I had really mastered the law.”
His essays would become so good, they’d look almost like the model answer.
💬 “If you look at the Barbri formal essay and my practice essay, it would be almost 85-90% similar.”
This isn’t easy, but it’s simple.
