I sat in on a bar prep panel at UC Irvine with Professors Mary Basick and Tina Schindler the other month.
If you’ve spent any time looking into CBX resources, these legends have probably crossed your radar. You might already be using one of their co-authored books Essay Exam Writing for the California Bar Exam and California Performance Test Workbook.
After an hour in that room, I got to confirm what moves the needle in bar prep.
My favorite moment:
Me: “Well, you learn to swim by getting in the water, not studying water.”
Tina: “I love that.”
🥺
My notes and insights from the talk:
Bar prep strategies
- Practice over passive learning. Knowing rules =/= knowing how to apply them
- Brian’s own experience: followed Kaplan’s program to the letter, could write beautiful rule statements, still failed with mid scores across the board
- Missing piece: skill and insight to apply knowledge under exam conditions
- Brian’s own experience: followed Kaplan’s program to the letter, could write beautiful rule statements, still failed with mid scores across the board
- Start practicing before you feel ready. Waiting until rules feel fully memorized is a trap
- Do questions open-book early
- Pattern recognition develops through repetition. Bar examiners test the same ~20 variations repeatedly!
- Detach identity from practice scores. Treat each attempt as data collection. Treat performance like a scientist collecting data. Have enough confidence not to judge yourself.
- Parallels: like learning to drive by watching videos vs. turning the wheel, or like learning to swim by studying water vs. getting in the water
Resources mentioned for California bar prep
- AdaptiBar or UWorld: MBE/MCQ question banks
- BarEssays.com: returned essays from California bar takers, useful for calibrating essay quality. Compare what a 50 versus a 65 versus a 75 looks like
- I also keep a bank of graded answers here
- Discount codes for AdaptiBar, UWorld, and BarEssays kept up to date here
- Make This Your Last Time (Brian’s website): bar prep strategies, resources, tools, newsletters, stories and lessons from others’ experiences
- Lawyers Mutual / Cal Lawyer (event sponsor)
- I’ve been trying to get a recording of the event… Will link when available
Course planning if you’re still in law school
- UCI has fewer required bar-tested subjects than most. Students must be proactive
- Property and Evidence are not required here (!)
- Take every bar-tested subject available
- Starting bar prep materials early (before 3L year) reduces the intensity of the 10-week crunch
- Take advantage of resources funded by school
[They also talked about career paths and imposter syndrome. Skipping it here in favor of bar-related lessons.]
Takeaways and commentary
A good chunk of the conversation kept circling back to one idea: The biggest obstacle for a lot of students is trust in themselves, rather than information.
When I failed the bar exam the first time, I’d followed my prep course to the letter. I wrote down meticulous notes, rewound lectures to fill in the blanks, and did all the assignments. I remember falling behind schedule permanently because I went out for lunch with a friend one time. I was merely going through the motions without being conscious about whether I was actually learning. Without questioning what I was doing, I assumed this process would automatically install the skills needed to pass the exam. This was exhausting and unproductive. And this is extremely classic behavior for novice bar preppers that I see happen every year (meaning it’s fixable, good news).
What I didn’t have was agency in myself to take ownership over my studies, nor the confidence to sit with not knowing exactly what to do in the moment. I “knew” the law but didn’t know how to use it.
The students who keep showing up, despite having cold sweats at first because their page is blank or because their MBE choices may as well be random, tend to outperform the ones who think they can outsmart the exam with their thoughts alone. Doing is the best form of thinking.
That said, I’m also not a fan of the “just practice practice practice” advice, because it overcorrects and oversimplifies. We’re not saying that reviewing source materials (e.g., lectures, outlines, flashcards) isn’t important. How else are you supposed to get foundational knowledge to try using it? How else do you review your work? A balance of pre-review, practice, and feedback is needed. Passive “study” alone gets you about 10% of the way. The trap is staying there instead of moving into implementation.
Collecting data points through implementation
Mary and Tina talked about treating every practice question like a scientist collecting data instead of letting your ego see it as a test of your worth:
💬 “Like Mary was saying, it really is about being like you’re collecting data. You can think of yourself almost like a scientist.”
💬 “What can I learn from this question? What can I learn about how to approach those? What can I learn about the mental stamina it takes? To stay focused for that long so that even just the fact that you did, let’s say three essays and three hours or whatever, like you just did what you needed to do and the amount of time that you needed to do, even just doing that is helpful.”
💬 “When you’re practicing, you’re also memorizing your rules. You’re doing things that you don’t realize you’re doing in that moment.”
When you take a practice test, you’re not trying to judge yourself for being good or bad (unless you’re a masochist and shame works on you). You’re finding out what you don’t know yet, instead of finding out on the exam, which is the entire point of testing yourself in the first place. You SHOULD be getting things wrong now and using that data to patch the holes in your understanding.
If you’re good already, what’s the point of prep? Prep = prepare. The point is to BECOME competent and develop the skill.
Tina compared it to learning to drive. You could watch forty hours of instructional video and read the entire handbook, and none of that replaces actually sitting behind the wheel and stepping on the gas.
Don’t just stand there. Give it a try. Who would you trust to do an emergency landing if the pilot has a heart attack: a trainee who’s memorized the manual or the passenger who’s flown amateur planes? In bar prep, watching hours of lecture video can make you feel like you’re learning, but it’s a different skill than sitting down with a closed-book practice question and forcing yourself through it while you’re still not sure you can do it. Then learning from what happened.
When Mary and Tina wrote their essay book, they mapped out how past essays get asked across issues that keep resurfacing. The past will guide your future. The bar exam can’t test beyond a limited number of issues and variations. Once you know how to solve them, you know how to solve the exam. This is the weakness of the bar exam.
Final thoughts
There were a lot more gems, but hopefully the main points got across.
Thanks to Mary and Tina for being generous with their time, and reminding us not to blindly trust some process but to trust ourselves and trust the right process for us. The right process for you is whatever one that helps you understand and retain the material and answer questions correctly.
Advice is autobiography. There’s a lot of advice that sounds good, but they are all said through their own lived experiences. Meaning it may or may not suit your situation.
So I want to encourage you to do a practice set today to see where you stand, find out where your weaknesses are (it’s much less painful to face this now than when you get your results), and figure out how you’re going to patch up those holes. You should be excited to generate data that will help you be stronger on the exam.
Again, a few resources mentioned that could help support your data collection:
- AdaptiBar or UWorld for MCQ practice
- BarEssays for reading real graded California essays
- Discount codes for the above kept up to date here