NCBE Online MBE Practice Tests Forum

[huckabees]

So is the consensus that using Adaptibar as primary MBE prep would be dangerous/too easy? (They use only real released questions.)

I think some of the MBEs tested difficult or fine-line application of the rules, but other times, I was just confused because I thought the rule itself had not come up much or at all during my practice.

I recall a shifting burdens question and a question on taking judicial notice of a learned treatise which I did not come across often.

[massarisucks]

NOTE TO ANYONE CONSIDERING NCBE PRACTICE EXAMS IN THE FUTURE:

I took all of the NCBE exams available, and I just finished taking the bar. The bar was definitely harder than the questions NCBE puts in the practice exams. The real questions are probably somewhere in between what Barbri gives you and what NCBE gives you. The real value in taking these exams is to acclimate yourself to a slightly different style of question. /2cents

100% agree.

[Bronx Bum]

LOL DO NOT USE THESE. YOU'LL HONESTLY GET A 170 RAW ON THIS AND THEN FAIL THE IRL MBE. DON'T TAKE.

[blurbz]

LOL DO NOT USE THESE. YOU'LL HONESTLY GET A 170 RAW ON THIS AND THEN FAIL THE IRL MBE. DON'T TAKE.

I mean, they were easy, yeah, but why do you think you failed? You took the NY bar and they haven't released results yet!

[5ky]

The real MBE is probably harder than these, but not by as much as people are exaggerating here. They are still a useful tool. I found that they 'felt' a little different than the 1500 Barbri questions I had done -- I only used NCBE questions at the very end of my studies -- and was glad I saw some questions that were slightly different than what I was used to. That was good practice, though Barbri did a really excellent job in writing their questions.

[Mroberts3]

I agree that the real bar questions "felt" harder, but that does not mean they really were. If you do a set of 25 questions and feel iffy about 7, you might think it was kinda hard (especially if it has months to fester in your head). But because you can check your score right away and see that you actually got 22/25 right, your brain recalibrates expectation and you think "oh, that wasn't so hard."

On the other hand, when you do 200 in a row after a FULL DAY of essays, you will inevitably only remember the ones you struggled with. I read the thread where people discussed the MBE questions and found that my answer on questions I found hard was the same as the consensus answer most of the time. The only thing weird about the MBE was some of the fact patterns (unrelated to law tested) and some of the civ pro type questions that are experimental for when that joins the mix in a few years.

Plus, I am fairly sure these are real questions that were used once. This means they have a scaled score based on actual bar takers. Now I suppose it's possible that people have been preparing more and so they have made the test harder, but this seems be a marginal difference at best.

[Mroberts3]

though Barbri did a really excellent job in writing their questions.

I STRONGLY disagree with this. I felt like barbri's questions were half-assed. Often hard questions were only so because the fact pattern was like a full page (rare on the real thing) and extremely convoluted. I often felt like I could explain what rule barbri MEANT to test but had no clue what the actual answer was supposed to be. Finally, the explanations were even worse. Often they were no better than "A is wrong, thus C is correct" or "A is not as good as C because [insert completely made up factual assumption that makes C better]."

/rant