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What I try to explain to students and what I try to explain in my book, is that taking
the bar exam is like running for president in that presidential candidates need to focus
on the states with the most electoral votes to be elected: California, Texas, New York,
and so on. And the bar exam is organized in a similar way -- there are certain subjects
that are highly tested: the California, if you will, of the bar exam: negligence, contract
formation, that students really need to do very, very well in. On the other hand, there
are questions, there are subject areas that are not heavily tested, and what I try to
do is get students to realize is it's okay if they don't learn the law in those areas
as long as they are maximizing the points in the areas that are tested most heavily.
Well, the typical course is made up of videos, watching law professors teach about the substantive
law, the outlines that accompany a course, and practice questions, and by far, practice
questions, doing practice questions, learning from mistakes, is the best way to learn for
the bar exam. The videos and the outlines have their place, but I tell students if they
can learn in the context of fact patterns, because that's how the bar exam organized,
you have to learn how to solve problems. So, it's one thing to learn the elements of a
crime -- it's another thing to be able to apply that in the context of a fact pattern,
and moreover, if a student gets an answer wrong, to understand why it's wrong and why
the, all three answer choices are wrong and why the correct answer is right because the
bar examiners can only ask questions in a certain way, and the more questions that a
student does, the more familiar they will become with the exam and how to approach questions.
Remaining positive and confident throughout the bar preparation phases is critical for
success. Bar preparation is difficult, it's challenging; the bar exam is difficult and
challenging. But it's very do-able and most people pass. That's what I try to stress to
students -- that they can do this and that they should not get frustrated with a difficult
question or a difficult area of law because the truth is, no one is looking for perfection.
You don't have to get an A to pass the bar exam. There's a certain critical number of
questions you need to get right, and there are going to be exceedingly difficult questions
that it's okay to get wrong and for students to feel comfortable with that.
There's a very high correlation between one's law school grades and passing the bar exam
-- class rank is highly indicative of bar passage. Students in the top of their class
pass the bar exam at a rate higher than students at the bottom of the class. An average students
is one whose chances of passing the bar exam are less than other students -- they have
certain characteristics that we track throughout law school that indicate that the bar exam
may be a struggle for them, typically, how they perform in classes, the subjects of which
are tested on the bar exam.
I wrote this book to help students prepare for their commercial bar exam course. This
book is meant to be used before those courses begin, not in lieu of a commercial course,
and the idea is that students begin to learn how to think about the exam and how to organize
the material that they are going to need to learn, and more importantly, how to apply
that material on the bar exam so that, starting day one of their commercial course, they're
getting maximum benefit.