What do you do if you have been studying diligently but still don’t know the law? This is such a common feeling among bar students. In my opinion, this happens when you haven’t been studying correctly or spending time actually learning the law. Let’s discuss what most students spend their time doing while studying for the bar exam:
They listen to hours upon hours of lectures, read outlines for hours upon hours, make flash cards for hours upon hours, and then do a practice essay here and there, some MBE questions, and maybe one or two performance tests.
What is wrong with this picture? You likely aren’t spending any time learning the law. You are just a hamster on the bar exam study wheel, checking things off your list, putting in the hours, but not really learning anything! So what do you do?
Shake it up!
You need to try to study the material in different ways. Here are a few suggestions.
- You can make your own study materials (even make handwritten materials) taking into consideration how to simplify the material so you can understand it (and actually memorize it).
- You can get together with someone else and take turns “teaching” the law to each other. Remember if you can explain it to someone else, you likely understand it yourself.
- You can create fun mnemonics (or even songs) to help you remember certain law and learn it.
- And you can practice essay questions to work on applying the law and writing out your analysis. Then test yourself as to whether you could change the facts in the fact pattern to change the outcome. To do this, you need to understand the law and how it is applied to the facts.
These are just a few suggestions. Do you have any suggestions on how to shake up your study routine to help you learn the law?
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I find highlighting in multiple colors helps. A teacher in high school forced us to buy highlighters in blue, pink, yellow, green, orange, and purple (good luck finding purple by the way). Each color was assigned a specific reason. Blue is vocab, pink is definitions, yellow is time periods, etc. By highlighting in specific colors it forces me to really think about what it is and why it is important. Also, when I’m gone I go back to the outlines and cut out things that were not highlighted. I re-print and redo the process. It helps me narrow down what matters.
Doesn’t hurt that it makes the outlines far prettier to look at.
Hi Joanne: It is amazing how going back to grade school techniques can help us on the bar exam, right? Alison would love this approach because she loves highlighters! Today, I was just recommending to students that they use a piece of scratch paper to help them read slowly (by covering later text and reading line-by-line) as we did with rulers in grade school to force them to focus and carefully read MBE questions.
One thing a past instructor told me to try was to record myself reading my notes into an audiorecorder and then going back to listen to it later. I haven’t tried it out yet for the bar, but will probably do so soon to try to help things stick in my brain better. I could also listen while I am at work and try to multitask when I am doing lighter work that doesn’t require my full attention 🙂
Another good suggestion, Livy. I know a student of mine who lives in LA listens to lectures in her car to and from work to multitask. Perhaps you can listen to them in your car and/or on public transit as well.
I did that when I studied for exams in law school and when I studied for the bar exam. Now that everything is digital, it is super easy and cheap to make these recordings. I would sometimes listen to myself reciting the law as I would fall asleep at night. A bit weird, maybe, but it seemed to work for me.