Post-bar wrap up

I took the Maryland Bar Exam Tuesday and Wednesday. I think I probably passed. But the passage rate is about 75%, so it is probable that I passed. I was really nervous the morning of the first day, but after watching the proctors/bar exam exercise their minimal incompetency by being unable to set up speakers or pass out exam questions and extracts, I stopped being nervous because of how ridiculous it was. I also finished each MBE section pretty early, about a half hour, after checking answers. If I check them for too long I just second guess myself, and I have shown no ability to actually recognize what questions I got wrong.

For materials, BarBri's convisor mini review was pretty much the bible. Both barbri and kaplan MBE questions are harder than the actual questions, so practice on those but do at least a 100 question set online through the National Bar Examiners. It's $26 for each 100 question set, but worth it only for the sense of security it gives you. I was getting about 75% of those questions right, which was quite a bit better than I did with the Barbri/Kaplan questions. I thought Barbri gave better explanations for MBE answers than Kaplan did.

If I had to do it again (which hopefully won't happen in Maryland) I would do some type of lecture thing all the way through. It's a lot easier to pay attention to a lecture than read an outline, even if it's only audio. The Kaplan MBE lectures were great, and then I just went through the MD distinctions in Convisor (but Convisor doesn't have the Crim Law & Pro distinctions for MD, so I had to go through the Barbri lectures for those and picked up a lot by going through practice essays). An essay book is also necessary, as is an MBE book. Ameribar has OK lectures, but they are very dry and if you do Ameribar you have to buy the whole package, and I think the Barbri materials are better organized and the essays include statutory extracts where you would get them for the exam.

Finally, a warning on buying used testing materials. Used outlines are fine, but used MBE workbooks and essay books can be a little sketchy because the previous person may have already gone through and underlined things, marked answers, or written key things in the margins. So even though they may be wrong, it won't be the full experience of going through and having to figure it out. I got lucky, I guess, and I had a lot of MBE questions that hadn't been done and the essay book was almost untouched. So just check the materials first.

From now on this will morph into a travel blog. Not as useful for the bar, but some motivation, I hope, to get through it.

This will make you laugh after 200 MBE Questions

I also wanted to point out that this is hilarious: http://legallynoted.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/studying-for-the-bar-this-will-make-you-laugh/

Especially funny after you've done a practice MBE.

Review Plan

This time next week I will hopefully be sleeping, because the bar exam will be the following morning. The review plan is going well. I review flashcards for 3-4 hours a day, usually get through 2-3 subjects, and my goal for each day is to do 6 essays and 36 MBE questions, just to stay on track to finish with 10 essay questions per subject and 340 MBE questions per subject. I'm trying to make flashcards a priority, though. I know how to write an essay. I know how to do multiple choice questions. But I still can't always remember what a buyer's remedies are when he receives a nonconforming shipment, and memorizing that stuff is more important than just wasting my time doing questions I can't do.

I took a practice MBE last Friday and scored 59.5%. It was one of BarBri's practice MBEs, and they claim that the average is 58%, so that wasn't bad. But a 67% is about passing on a real MBE. I'm going to do another practice MBE on Thursday with the online MBE that NCBE puts out. http://www.ncbex2.org/catalog/. It's $50 for 200 questions (I don't know why one set of 100 costs $2 more than the other), but I figure it's worth it to practice with real MBE questions. I did 40 Con Law real MBE questions and scored 70% and they seemed easier than both the BarBri and Kaplan ones. There were some answer choices you could immediately identify as bad. But I think it's been good to practice with hard questions.

I'm feeling pretty good about this, but I am glad that I have another week left to study. I'm really not that stressed out about it. I feel like I have a lot of time in the day- I can study for 10-11 hours, work out, maybe sew something or go out. Of course, if I could go to sleep before 1am I would have less time in the day... need to work on that. Can't roll out of bed at 8am for the bar exam!

The MBE fries my brain

Now that I am working on MBE subjects, time is getting more crunched. The regular study plan is to do your subject essays for that day and then do 50 MBE questions per day, or something like that. But I felt like it was useless and depressing to go over MBE questions that I hadn't covered yet in lectures, so I am doing big blocks of MBE questions out of the PMBR book once I go through the lecture and essays. For example, today I did 175 Crim Law MBE questions. I am also checking my answers after each quesion, so this took about 8-9 hours (I had a minor kitchen accident during this since I forgot that vinegar + baking soda = volcano. Another example of my brain being fried). I do think this method helps me learn the material better. This means that going through MBE subjects takes about an extra day or so than Maryland-only subjects.

I thought that I don't get stressed about exams, but I have noticed that I am crankier and forgetful lately. Of course, these are classic symptoms of bar studying that I was sure I would avoid, but I also thought I knew contracts, so really, what do I know?

Rock climbing, my favorite activity, tends to make my brain feel a lot better and I am able to think more clearly after I've been climbing for about an hour or so. Probably because it is nonverbal. What I need to work on is being a nice person if I go directly from studying to socializing. I think it's the talking- my verbal capacity is so strained that I am unable to express myself and get frustrated. So new rule: have to go work out between studying and social events, or I won't have anymore social events to go to.

Lecture- based studying

I've started doing MBE subjects, for which I have audio PMBR lectures, and I have to say that this goes much easier than trying to read through the outlines or read the BarBri lectures. Even though its the same content, it's harder for the mind to wander when there is a man in my computer telling me about how Miss Cleo was his former secretary (yes, this actually happened towards the end of the PMBR crim law lecture). If I had to do it again (which better not actually happen), I would get some sort of audio lecture program, like Ameribar, for Maryland. My friend who is doing Ameribar says that the Ameribar lectures are very dry, but even an outline read to me is better than me trying to read it myself, and then thinking about my next grocery shopping trip instead. Because really, everything else on the planet is more interesting than studying for the bar exam.

Note on Ameribar: apparently in the essay books they do not include the statutory extracts that are provided to you on the exam. BarBri materials do. These extracts are very nice in helping to answer questions in sales, secured transactions, commercial paper, and civ pro without having to remember stuff. Ameribar gives you citations to the Maryland code, but BarBri and the actual exams give you the extracts themselves. I guess if you do Ameribar you will be pleasantly surprised when there are statutory extracts on your exam, but you will have wasted precious brainpower trying to remember how many days you have to file a motion to revise a verdict, when the examiners give you stuff like that.

Maryland is better than Virginia

In the DC metro area, people have a lot of options for bar exams. Something that has come up at parties two weeks in a row (law school parties, of course) is whether to take Maryland or Virginia (nobody seems to ever take DC. Why not, if you can waive in?) So here are some reasons why MD is better:

1. No CLE
2. You do not have to drive to Roanoke to take the bar exam
3. You do not have to dress up to take the bar exam
4. Voluntary bar association
5. Less intensive background check
6. No MPRE 
7. You can be admitted by motion into VA after 5 years of practice. You always have to take an attorney's exam in Maryland. So why not start with Maryland to begin with?

If you have more, let me know. Or if you would like to defend the silly driving to Roanoke thing and wearing a suit, by all means go ahead.

Conviser Mini-Review Outlines are so Much Better

For Agency and Partnership I had used BarBri's detailed Maryland outline, which is not only so large it barely fits on my desk next to my computer, but also includes extraneous information. At the beginning of my PR outline I switched to using the Conviser mini-review outline as the basis, and it seems more efficient.

After the long outline went into free speech problems that can arise under an integrated bar association (after pointing out that MD has a voluntary bar association), I started to think that this was silly. After looking through the blogosphere I found http://dcbarexam.blogspot.com/2009/03/final-thoughts-on-self-study-materials.html, who pointed out that the long outlines were not really necessary unless you wanted to brag about your high score (and in Maryland they just tell you whether you pass, so there's no point in that). It still took me about 6 hours to go through the Conviser outline and make my own outline for PR and do flashcards, but it is clear that BarBri expects you to use the Conviser outlines. That's where all their exam tips and summaries and convenient charts are.

I didn't do super great on the PR essays, but everything I missed was in the mini outline or the lecture, so it doesn't seem like I missed out by not going over the long outline. I just really need to learn the material better.

It was also more efficient to go through the outline before going through the lecture, because when I go through the lecture I can just add to what I already have in my notes/flashcards and have a better sense for overall structure.

Self- study for the Maryland Bar

So I was just going to make this a blog about my post-bar awesome trip I have planned but then I thought about how helpful blogs about self-studying for the bar were for me in deciding how to formulate a study plan and building the confidence I needed to take the plunge and avoid BarBri. So I thought maybe I could pass along my own experience to help others do the same.

I graduated from Georgetown Law about a week ago and am studying in a loosely formed group with 2 other Georgetown grads. Our plan is to study during the week independently, maybe a little on the weekends, and have group review sessions on Friday, maybe Saturday.  We are all using different materials. I am studying from 2009 Barbri books that I bought for $400 from a girl who graduated last year. One of the other girls is using Ameribar only, and another girl is using 2009 used Barbri books plus Kaplan MBE materials.

As for the schedule, we are using Ameribar's schedule because it seems to be organized in a more logical manner than Barbri's (MD topics first, then MBE topics). Since MD stuff is worth 2x as much on the bar exam, I thought it reasonable to start with that so I can make up flashcards as soon as possible. I did do Barbri's multistate preview last week (sans lectures), which involves a 25-question quiz on each MBE topic and then a 100 question quiz. I found the detailed answers very helpful in explaining things and was able to make quite a few flashcards out of that. I got 54% right. Subject-wise I did the best in Evidence (63%) and the worst in property (35%). Clearly my strength in MBE subjects does not track my grades on those subjects in law school. On the 25 question quizzes, I generally got about half right, although I did better in Torts, Con Law, and Evidence. I think Contracts & Property (courses I did will in in law school) will be hard for me on the exam because I won't have the luxury of being able to look up the UCC or hit ctrl+F in my outline, and those subjects tend to have pretty specific rules. I also just took Con Law II & Evidence, so they are fresh in my mind. Why I am doing so well in torts I have no idea. But I figure this is decent for not having done any lectures on these subjects.

We were not planning to start studying substantive Maryland topics until today, but I came down with a cold and started studying this weekend because I couldn't do anything else. Combining BarBri materials with the Ameribar schedule has been a little interesting, since BarBri combines Agency/Partnership and Commercial Paper/Secured transactions into 1 day each, while Ameribar treats them as separate subject deserving of 2 days- e.g., 2 days just for agency. The "lectures" I have are filled-in handouts for BarBri's lectures. What I did with Agency/Partnership was to go over the lecture, make some flashcards, then fill in my outline (which is of course heavily based on the BarBri one but I think it's useful to write this stuff out yourself), making more flaschards, and then doing practice essays. While I am not yet finished with this for Agency/Partnership (about half way through my partnership outline), I have found it to create a lot of non-helpful repetition because the outlines are so much more organized and comprehensive than the lectures and I have trouble remembering if I've made a flashcard for a certain topic yet. For the next subject (Ethics/PR) I will do the outline first (while making flashcards), use the lecture to repeat important points & review (& make more flashcards if necessary), then do practice essays, which will hopefully make the process more efficient.

I also want to give a shout out to this University of Dayton School of Law website that has some really helpful information on studying for the bar & a bar study checklist that I have used: http://academic.udayton.edu/LegalEd/barpass/General/advice02a.htm. (I am guessing "R" means Read Outline, which for me means writing out the table of contents, then filling it in as I read the outline).

Hello Blogging

Nothing up yet... mainly wanted to see how this worked before I set out on my travels this summer/fall.