A Slightly Counterintuitive Way to Study for the MBE

As we get closer to the February bar exam, studying efficiently becomes ever more important.

Here’s a tip for improving your MBE scores — force yourself to focus primarily on the material you don’t know.

Think about the way most people study for the MBE: Indiscriminately working through whatever questions happen to appear, with no rhyme or reason. Now, before you freak out, let me say that of course it’s important to do some MBE practice under testing conditions, where different types of questions appear randomly.

But, at this point, I’d argue it’s as important — if not more important — to get better at the questions you consistently miss. Quickly!

What I Always Missed

For me, it was 4th Amendment questions. I had a law school professor who taught us that the police could do pretty much whatever they wanted. (She’s now a judge, but that’s a whole other story.) As a result, when I started studying for the bar exam, I missed — quite literally — every single MBE question relating to search and seizure law.

If I’d just been randomly doing MBE questions, I’m not sure I would have picked up on this trend for quite a while. But it was pretty immediately apparent, because I was studying with a computer program that tracked the categories I missed and fed me new questions on the same topic until eventually I learned the law. (Or, in this case, learned that my instinctual response was almost certainly wrong!)

Result? I started getting all of these questions right, drastically improving my MBE score in a short period of time.

How You Can Apply This to Your Own Bar Study

The simplest way to use this study technique is with specialized software. (I used Multistate Edge, and AdaptiBar seems very similar.)

But you can pretty easily recreate the experience in DIY form, too. Simply look back at all the MBE practice you’ve done recently (or that you do going forward), and write down the topic covered by each question you missed. See a trend? Get out your study materials and review the law to figure out where you’re going wrong. Find more of those questions and drill yourself relentlessly until you get all of them right.

When you start getting all of the questions right, good job. But don’t stop there! Continue to review your “problem area” questions every couple of days, to ensure you don’t forget what you learned and slip into your default “wrong” answers.

I’ll warn you — this technique isn’t pleasant (it’s far more pleasant to study topics you already know). But it is effective.

Force yourself to study what you don’t know, and you’ll get better — fast!

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Did you find this post helpful? Check out some other great articles:

• Top 5 Study Tips for Conquering the MBE
• MBE Trouble? Tips for Studying Again
• There is just Too Much MBE Law to Learn
• How NOT to be an MBE Victim

Image by StefanG81 via stock.xchng.