Secrets Your Bar Review Course Won’t Spill

A bar review course can make you wonder whether trying to finish it has somehow become a second bar exam.

You’re stuck in an overwhelming hellscape of cookie-cutter schedules, droning lectures, singing professors, outlines, workbooks, assignments…

Completing every assignment may give you a sense of accomplishment, but it doesn’t mean that you’re developing the skills needed to earn points on the bar exam (and pass).

You do NOT get extra points on your exam for completing 100% of the course.

You have more flexibility than your course’s schedule might suggest. You’re allowed to skip lectures when your time would be better spent practicing, adjust your daily assignments, and spend additional time on subjects that need attention.

Does it even make sense that you and everyone else taking it have the exact same program? Or that the course assumes the same learning style? Watching yet another three-hour lecture at 1.5x speed and hoping your brain was listening may not be the most productive use of your afternoon.

Your course provides the raw materials, but their curriculum is simply a suggestion. In fact, you are the dean of your own studies.

Here are five things to consider before letting Barbri or Themis dictate every hour of your life.

1. You Can Skip (At Least Some) Lectures

Your bar review course probably has dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of lectures lined up to assault your ears. And the schedule expects you to watch them all.

But how much are you learning from sitting through another lecture on adverse possession while your mind wanders off to dinner?

Lectures can be helpful when you’re unfamiliar with a subject or need someone to explain a difficult concept. But once you understand the basics, you may get more out of spending that time putting yourself in real context through practice questions, reviewing explanations, or memorizing rules.

You can also use lectures selectively.

Struggling with hearsay exceptions? Watch that particular segment.

Already comfortable with negligence? Let go of FOMO. Move on.

There’s no need to sit through three hours of material just in case you missed something. Prioritize “just in time” knowledge (developing understanding and insights as you work through examples) over “just in case” knowledge (hoarding information you don’t know what to do with).

And don’t confuse watching a lecture (and being able to “recognize” something) with knowing the material. Nodding along as a professor explains a rule feels easy. Try explaining that same rule from memory afterward. Better yet, try applying it to a fact pattern you’ve never seen before.

Am I saying lectures are completely worthless and useless and deserve to have imposter syndrome? No (maybe).

I’m just saying you’ll find out pretty quickly how much (little) of that lecture made it into your brain. In fact, you’ll realize you forgot 99% of yesterday’s lecture.

Your prep time is limited. Give yourself permission to skip, skim, or speed up lectures when another study activity would help you more. That completion tracker in the corner will survive just fine without you.

2. JUST DO IT

You could spend all day transcribing videos, taking notes, and highlighting rules. Feels like progress!

But eventually, you need to find out whether you can use any of that information when confronted with a question.

And there’s a way to find out: Do the practice questions. Use the rules (and issues) in context.

Practice questions present you with context, forcing you to recognize relevant facts (that signal the legal issue), retrieve the relevant rule, identify any exceptions, and apply it to unfamiliar scenarios. Unfamiliar scenarios then eventually become second nature. You also get to discover all the creative ways you can misunderstand a rule you thought you knew perfectly well.

Get MBE questions: UWorld MBE QBank or AdaptiBar (discount codes here).

Get Essays and PT questions: Download them from the past exam archive.

As you work through more questions, you’ll begin recognizing recurring patterns. Certain facts should trigger certain legal issues. Certain answer choices will start looking suspiciously familiar.

You’ll develop a better sense of what the examiners are testing and how they expect you to apply the law. The weakness of the bar exam is that there’s only a limited universe of ways they can test you.

You’ll also develop your timing and decision-making skills. Knowing the rule is helpful. Being able to identify the issue, apply the appropriate rule, eliminate three plausible answer choices, and move on within the allotted time takes practice, too.

Start doing practice questions early, even before you feel ready.

You don’t have to finish an entire subject before attempting questions on it. In fact, getting questions wrong can help you identify what you need to learn next.

The review process is especially important. Whether you missed a question or got it right, figure out WHY. Did you misunderstand the rule? Overlook a critical fact? Get distracted by an attractive answer choice? Did you know the rule but struggle to apply it?

Did you happen to select the credited answer for the wrong reason? Just because you were correct doesn’t mean you were right.

Even questions you answered correctly deserve a quick review in case you guessed or arrived at the answer through faulty reasoning.

In short: Build practice questions into your daily routine early on. Review the explanations, track your recurring mistakes, and revisit weak areas.

You can read about swimming all day. At some point, you have to get in the water. Preferably before the bar exam throws you into the deep end. You learn to swim by getting in the water, not by studying water.

3. Stop “Issue Spotting”

You’ve probably heard that you need to get better at “issue spotting” to improve your essays.

Great advice!

But how do you do it?

Stare at a fact pattern until the issues reveal themselves? Wait for a sudden burst of legal enlightenment? Maybe the issues will announce themselves if you squint hard enough.

Here’s a more methodical approach that ensures you get the points on the essay: issue checking.

The bar exam tests a limited universe of legal issues. Those issues tend to appear in recurring fact patterns, often alongside related issues, exceptions, and defenses.

So what you need are checklists of issues you can go through for every subject. Your job is to become familiar enough with them that you can deliberately check which ones are triggered by the facts. Think of it like pre-flight checklist.

Suppose a Criminal Law essay question describes someone taking another person’s property and using force to escape.

You might check for:

• Larceny, because property was taken somewhere in the facts.
• Robbery, because property was taken and force was involved.
• Battery, because there was unwanted physical contact.
• Assault, because there was fear or apprehension of imminent harmful contact.
• Any related issues, exceptions, or defenses suggested by the remaining facts—such as transferred intent between battery and assault.

See how you’re developing a roadmap for your essay before you even start writing?

The process starts with knowing the available issues in each subject. Use short outlines like Magicsheets organized for issue identification and rule recitation, issue checklists, and past essay answers to build that knowledge. As you practice, pay attention to which facts trigger particular rules and which issues tend to travel together.

FACTS → RULES → ISSUES.

You can even practice this without writing an entire essay: Print out a past essay question, give yourself 5-10 minutes to outline the relevant issues on the sheet (on blank space), and compare your list with the sample answer.

(If you add reciting the rules to this process, this becomes a process of cutting your practice time in half called essay cooking.)

The paper part is important because you’ll be doing the exact same thing on the actual exam, outlining and organizing the issues on scratch paper or the question sheet before typing your answer.

Now check with the sample answer: Did you identify the major issues? Did you miss an exception or defense? Did you spend precious time discussing something the examiners weren’t asking about?

You might discover that some of the points you missed were sitting right there in the facts. Obvious in hindsight but now obvious in foresight if you run into a similar fact pattern.

As you repeat this exercise, you’ll build a collection of familiar issue patterns. And when you encounter a new fact pattern on exam day, you’ll have a systematic way to work through it. In fact, essay cooking through dozens of essays leaves you with a stack of issue outlines you can review even on test day.

I’ve written a more detailed walkthrough of issue checking, along with video walkthroughs here 📺.

You can also use issue checklists and flowcharts such as Approsheets to help you identify the relevant issues, sub-issues, exceptions, and defenses.

The goal is to raise as many relevant issues as possible and develop an organized answer that earns points. You can know every rule in your outline, but if you never identify the issue that calls for it, how is the grader supposed to give you credit?

4. Customize Your Own Study Schedule

Your bar review course comes with a beautifully organized schedule that tells you exactly what to study, when to study it, and how long to spend on each activity.

It sounds convenient, but it’s not considerate of them to assume that everyone has the same strengths, weaknesses, learning speed, and daily obligations.

You might be working full-time. You might have children, family responsibilities, or other commitments. You might struggle with Evidence while some people could recite the hearsay exceptions in their sleep (congrats nerd).

Yet everyone gets essentially the same schedule.

Does that make sense? Not to me.

Your bar course’s study plan is a useful starting point. It gives you structure and helps you cover the subjects within the time available. But you should feel free to modify it as you discover what works for you.

For example:

• Already comfortable with Torts? Move through it more quickly. Skip the lectures. Or move on to practice questions sooner.
• Struggling with Civil Procedure? Watch a video on 1x speed to get a full tour of the subject. Give yourself more practice and review time instead of the 2 hours your course gives you.
• Feel fresher and retain information better in the morning? Schedule your most demanding activities then.
• Lectures and taking notes take up your entire day? Resist the temptation to fill every blank, and remember to make time to actively wrestle with practice questions.

Pay attention to your own performance and adjust accordingly.

Your practice results give you personalized data that helps you identify which subjects and subtopics need more attention. If you’re consistently missing questions about personal jurisdiction, perhaps another afternoon reviewing contract formation can wait. Watching a video on riding a bike does nothing if you don’t actually try to balance yourself.

Likewise, your schedule should evolve as the exam approaches.

Early in preparation, you may need more time to build your foundational knowledge and familiarize yourself with the subjects. As you progress, practice questions, memorization, reviewing mistakes, and timed exercises should take up an increasing share of your study time.

Account for your actual capacity. And assume you’ll need more time than you think.

If you work eight hours a day, have a family to take care of, or simply need to sleep like a functioning human being, adjust your schedule to accommodate those things. Add a buffer day or two to allow some slack in your life. Give yourself permission to have an imperfect day.

Forcing yourself to catch up on every missed assignment can also create a growing backlog.

You think scheduling your life by the hour and trying to retain some semblance of control that way will reduce your overwhelm? Eventually, you might find yourself spending more time managing your bar prep schedule than preparing for the bar exam.

The bar exam ONLY cares whether you learned how to resolve issues correctly. It doesn’t give a damn whether you managed to finish all of today’s 68 assigned tasks.

Allocate your time accordingly because you CAN create your own curriculum…

Remember that you’re the dean.

Review your progress periodically. Identify your weak areas, decide which activities deserve additional time, and make adjustments to your regimen as needed.

Your course can tell you what to study. But you have firsthand knowledge and ongoing awareness of how your preparation is going. The bar review police won’t come knocking if you miss an assignment (though you might feel permanently behind like I did when I went to have lunch with a friend).

5. Quality Over Quantity

There’s something strangely satisfying about telling people you studied for 12 hours yesterday.

Look at you. So dedicated. So hardworking.

But what did you accomplish during those 12 hours? Did you retain the material? Did you learn to come up with the right issues? Or did you spend half the afternoon reorganizing your pens, highlighting your notes, and shitposting on Reddit during your “five-minute break”?

You can spend an entire day studying and find yourself with surprisingly little RESULTS.

Measure your progress by what you can do with the material.

For example, consider two study sessions:

• You spend three hours reviewing a Constitutional Law outline, highlighting important passages, and adding notes to the margins.
• You spend an hour familiarizing yourself with the relevant rules, another hour working through practice questions (while trying to recall the rules on your own, since the act of attempting to recall is the basis of memorization), and the remaining hour reviewing your mistakes and filling gaps in your understanding.

Which session gave you more opportunities to test whether you know the material?

You can probably guess which one I’d prefer.

And you know which one you should do. Yet you don’t.

Pay attention to your ability to recall rules, identify issues, apply the law, and finish questions within the allotted time. These are tangible skills you continually evaluate and refine through practice and feedback.

Focus on your weaknesses without neglecting everything else.

As you practice, you’ll discover that some subjects and topics require considerably more attention than others.

Maybe you keep missing questions about mortgages. Maybe your essay answers consistently overlook defenses. Or maybe you know the rules perfectly well until someone starts a timer.

Good. You’ve found something to work on. This is useful data.

Give those weaknesses additional attention. Break difficult topics into manageable pieces, review the rules using a condensed outline like Magicsheets, and practice applying them until your performance improves.

You can also prioritize frequently tested topics that offer opportunities to earn more points. A targeted approach can help you allocate your limited time. Refer to the MBE Frequency Chart. But remember that everything is fair game on the exam.

Allow yourself breaks.

All that said, don’t turn every waking hour into study time because you feel guilty about stopping. Take frequent breaks using the pomodoro technique or the 20/10 cycle. (Keep going if you don’t feel like stopping, of course.)

A hack I like to use is to leave something unfinished, like a cliffhanger.

For example, start reading a question and go do something else. Your brain will have no choice but to try to close the loop when you come back to it. If you have trouble starting your study session, doing this right before sleep can work well.

Prepare with a purpose.

Doing questions is better than just reading outlines. You’re measuring yourself, like getting on a scale.

You get the most mileage by spending at least as much time studying your answers as attempting the questions. Dig into the explanations, identify gaps in your understanding, and figure out how you’ll approach similar questions next time.

This is the Practice + Feedback Loop.

Study groups: Be selective.

Should you join a study group?

Depends. Are you joining just in case something happens, or are you actually interested in engaging in studies with others?

Study groups can be helpful when you have reliable people to discuss difficult concepts with, exchange perspectives, and test your understanding.

While there are a few good ones out there, be careful when you join groups. They may turn into gossip sessions, arguments (which is why your parents shipped you off to law school), endless venting sessions, or simply just a bunch of people who said “add me” and expected everyone to be a tutor. You may ultimately be distracted from your goals if you join too many and nothing ever happens. If the group session does not fit your purpose, leave ASAP.

If you don’t already know that you learn well from study groups, don’t go start looking for them now. The bar exam is not the place to start.

Final Thoughts

Your bar review course gives you a substantial collection of resources and a plan for working through them.

It is merely one tool to support your self-study journey. Use what helps you. Discard what doesn’t.

You can watch lectures, skip some, start practice questions earlier, train yourself to check for issues, modify your schedule, and spend your study time on activities that improve your performance.

As you prepare, keep evaluating what you’re learning and how effectively you’re applying it. Your practice results will give you information you can use to refine your approach.

Use that information to make adjustments. Be willing to explore and experiment.

And remember that you do have control over how you spend this valuable time. As the dean of your own studies, it’s up to you to maximize your return on time.

Your bar review course is made to be standard issue and doesn’t know exactly what you need at every moment. You know your own progress, strengths, and weaknesses as they develop.

Your course completion percentage is allowed to stay at 87% forever. Your bar examiners aren’t going to call and ask about the missing 13%.

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