I know I’m asking for a lot here, but think back to law school for a moment. What do you remember?
- That fresh feeling of starting a new journey in a new place
- That cute girl next to you at orientation who smelled really good that you couldn’t help but introduce yourself to her and live dangerously close to the edge of flirting because she’s friendly and smart and familiar with the obscure music you listen to, but you force yourself to be platonic because you’d already locked yourself into a medium-distance relationship right before law school for some reason, and then she gets married to some balding guy with thinning hair and a suspicious mustache while you end your own relationship right before graduation because you’ve accepted that your life is full of irony
- FINAL EXAMS WORTH 100% OF YOUR GRADE
That escalated fast, but you know what the deal is. Final exams are serious business!
Basically, they invite you to join them in what looks like a warm pool party but instead charge you more than the median household income and then throw you into the cold winds of society.
So what do you do two weeks away from the final? I mean, after you procrastinate for a week and get that same sinking feeling you get as when you realize your carton of fries is almost empty.
Right, you go “oh shit” and finally print all those old essays that your prof tested in the past. It’s less likely that you’d look for essays that another professor wrote or from some book from Amazon unless you were some kind of weird gunner.
Same with bar essays… You’d practice with the exact same essays your bar examiners have given out before. You wouldn’t go back to the 7-page-long hypos from law school.
Then why would a bar taker insist on practicing for the MBE using questions someone wrote at Barbri/Kaplan/PMBR? Or get their essays “scored” by an underemployed seasonal contractor who gets paid $3 an essay and has no incentive to help you?
That’s a rhetorical question. The “difficulty” of their questions doesn’t give you the right kind of stress testing. There are undeniably better choices for MBE prep after talking with people who pretty much volunteer this info on me.
This is no joke because the MBE is worth up to 50% of your total score. In fact, it is 50% in CA and UBE states at least. The MBE is formidable, but it’s a very improvable and figure-out-able portion of the bar.
If you’ve started by crafting a flexible study schedule that works for you, the MBE is a good place to start since it’s where the points are, you don’t need to write, and MBE subjects will overlap with your essays anyway.
Below, I’ll offer (1) sources of MBE questions you want to use based on your budget and (2) how to optimize using them.
Continue reading “Improve Your MBE Score: 3 Rules for Effective MBE Preparation”
