What’s Your MEE and MPT Bar Prep Strategy?

There is no one right answer for how to prepare for the bar exam. Whether you are going with a commercial bar review provider, a private tutor, or self-guided preparation, it is important to remember that there is no magic formula to bar success. Sticking to your study plan is important, but don’t lose sight of the fact that your bar examiners will not give you any extra points for completing your pre-determined study schedule. It is dangerous to not individualize your bar prep to account for your particular weak spots as you begin to recognize them. Identifying your weaknesses and attacking those areas can provide real results, especially for the writing portions.

Build some flexibility into your study schedule to allow yourself time to focus on your weaknesses. One perfect tool to help you focus your practice in just the right spots is the Bar Exam Toolbox’s Brainy Bar Bank. 

Multistate Essay Exam (MEE)

Preparing for the MEE can be challenging because studying for this section is not as straight forward as powering through 100 MBE questions and then checking if you filled in the right bubble. The Brainy Bar Bank provides an efficient way to hone your practice and build your essay-writing confidence. This tool allows you the control to target your essay practice in the following ways:

By Subject

Does one type of question keep stumping you? Did you have a terrible Civil Procedure professor in law school and is it haunting you? Curious if you need to dedicate more time to studying business associations? With the Brainy Bar Bank, you can narrow the pool of essay questions to just the category of questions you want to target based on subject.

By Topic

Sometimes you don’t have a problem with an entire bar subject, but you do have a problem with a particular concept within a tested subject that just keeps driving down your essay performance. If you are generally strong in Civil Procedure, but subject-matter jurisdiction issues still make you uncomfortable, don’t waste time practicing Civil Procedure generally. The Brainy Bar Bank allows you to drill down into a subject and target just the subtopic that causes you problems.

By Subject or Topic Frequency

Because the Brainy Bar Bank is developed based on real past bar exams, it delivers unique insights into the frequency of the appearance of certain categories, topics, or subtopics. As you use the tool, your results are ranked by which subjects or topics are most frequently tested. It may not be the best strategy to overly rely on frequency to guide your study—a broad-based approach is usually best—but having a sense of which topics and subtopics are most frequently tested can certainly be a factor in deciding where to spend you precious practice time.

By Exam

Practice, practice, practice. Everyone has opinions on how best to prepare for the bar, but few would argue against more practice under exam like conditions. After honing in on your weaknesses and building your confidence across the spectrum of subjects, the Brainy Bar Bank provides mock exams identified by the year and month they were administered. Because they are labeled by their administration date, you will be able to avoid exam components you have already taken if your commercial bar prep provider or tutor also has you taking past exams.

Multistate Performance Test (MPT)

The MPT can be intimidating because the testing format does not feel as familiar to most examinees as multiple choice or essay questions. Don’t let the lack of familiarity be a stresser. The Brainy Bar Bank allows you to build your MPT confidence by providing practice questions organized in the following ways:

By Type of Document

The MPT will ask you to prepare some sort of document. The Brainy Bar Bank organizes 20 years of MPTs by the document type requested so that you can focus in on any given type of MPT prompt. Each type of document comes with its own challenges, so it can be helpful to attack the MPT based on which type of document the MPT is asking you to prepare.

By Type Frequency

Should you focus more on memo-type MPT questions or brief-type MPT questions? The Brainy Bar Bank offers the frequency analysis within all document types and within certain categories.

Whatever your bar prep study approach, it is always good to have one more efficient study tool at your disposal. The Brainy Bar Bank provides a great supplemental resource for focusing your practice to maximize your personal preparation for the bar. Doing practice MEE and MPT questions generally is good, but as you progress in your bar prep, identifying your weaknesses and investing targeted practice time on those trouble spots can really pay off. Look into the Brainy Bar Bank—it may be just the extra bar prep tool you need!