IT’S A NEW YEAR AND EVERYONE IS HAVING FUN WITHOUT ME!
It’s the New Year! People around you are excitedly making resolutions, mood boards, goal-setting grids, and planning their entire year (yes, these people do exist). You, on the other hand, have ONE resolution right now: pass the February 2020 Bar Exam.
With more bar review companies, techniques and advice than ever before, you have more choices. However, you also have more uncertainty on how to approach studying for the exam. So, we aren’t going to bore you with a long list of things to do, especially when you probably have about a thousand of those lists (many of them in flash card form too).
These 3 tips, however, we ARE going to share with you:
1. Practicing IS Studying
There is no such thing as “studying” first and then “practicing.” The very act of writing those essays and MPTs and doing the multiple choice from the start is truly the only way to study for an exam where you will be doing essays, MPTs and Multiple Choice. If you wait until you know everything to practice, you will never practice. Vicious cycle, we know.
2. You Do not Need to Know Everything
And, if you try, you may have a stroke. It doesn’t even make sense to know everything when, for most jurisdictions, passing means you only need to know about 67.5% of the stuffs. So concentrate on really knowing those big ticket items. Don’t freak about that one multiple choice question. That question where they asked you about a tree falling on a wild animal squirrel, which was owned by the little old lady next door.
She then suffered emotional distress because she has asked her landlord to fix the tree. Also, by the way, she was adverse possessing the tree. (Can you even adverse possess a tree?) Then the answer choice asks you whether leaving her estate to the wild animal squirrel violated the rule against perpetuities (it does not).
Suddenly you hit that question and then you frantically spend the next 10 hours looking up in your books, online, and in the Squirrel Digest. (This must exist, right?) “Squirrel RAP NEID WTF”. No. Get it wrong. Who cares? The squirrel is not coming back as a question. (It was squished by the tree after all.) Instead, learn Hearsay. That is coming back, forever and a lot.
3. Track Your Multiple-Choice Answers
We do not care how you do it. RG for “right but guessed”. WG for “wrong but guessed”. MDWB for “my dog was barking”. Whatever system gives you better insight into why you picked the answer you picked.
This is much better than randomly doing questions and then saying “today I suck at torts but yesterday I was great at it! I must have two personalities!” Let’s see what’s going on. Maybe yesterday you got a predominant amount of negligence questions, which you are great at. Today it was products liability, which you wish you could just bury 12 feet under.
Yesterday was stressful because you didn’t eat chocolate. Today you had chocolate (which, let’s be honest, is the answer to everything). These variables make a difference. They can vary our results.
Listen, you cannot follow all the tips all the time, especially if you are getting contradictory advice. But I promise you, the above is advice that should be engraved in stone because it is not changing and is not going anywhere.
* No squirrels were harmed during the writing of this article *