Most commercial bar review courses also have lectures on the written portions (how to approach an essay or a performance test) and the MBE. These lectures can give you general tips for approaching each section. I think a lot of these lectures are great. They give you a general approach to each part of the exam that you should try out and see if it works for you. The people who come up with these approaches are really smart folks (I am friends with some of them). And their approaches work for a lot of people.
But let’s be honest, they don’t work for everyone (or I wouldn’t have a job and so many students wouldn’t fail the bar exam every year).
And that is okay. Commercial bar review courses are created to help a large number of people prepare. They are not built strictly to support you. If you need additional help with essays, multiple-choice questions, or the performance test, you should ask for help. You can reach out to mentors, tutors or academic support professionals. Remember only you can make sure you are ready for the bar exam!
One of my students who was a repeat taker said something very telling to me last bar season. He was studying for the California bar exam for the second time. He said that during his commercial bar preparation program he knew that he wasn’t learning the law and practicing the way he needed to. He knew things weren’t going well. But he just kept going. And he ended up getting disappointing results.
What if he had admitted to himself that things weren’t going well and reached out for help? Read some books, got a tutor or just tried to re-think how he was preparing? Perhaps the outcome of his first exam would have been different.
There is nothing wrong with realizing that you need to change how you are studying to get the results you want. My mantra when I was studying for the bar exam was that I only wanted to do it once. So do what you need to in order to get success results on exam day!
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Want information on other bar exam tools out there? Check out these posts!
- Review of AdaptiBar
- Review of BarEssays.com (California)
- Bar Exam Mind: A Book Review
- Review of Critical Pass Flashcards
- What NOT to Write: A Book Review
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