Conquerer wrote:I’ve taken the bar exam every year since July 2015. I just recently failed on my 6th attempt. On my second attempt I was 3 points short, on my 4th, 5 points short. On my 5th, I was off by more than 10. I’m still waiting for my score report.
I’ve employed a bar exam tutor before but was unsuccessful. The study plans were not conducive to my learning style.
I excelled in law school and have never really had a problem with text anxiety or stress. I’ve put the work in and keep coming up short.
As you can imagine, it’s quite disheartening to keep failing. However, I’m willing to fight the good fight again in July. My app is now stale and I have a small turn around time to get everything in.
I need advice, suggestions, bar exam prep ideas? I’ve heard of Grossman...anyone hired him and been successful? Any others?
Sorry to hear this. I don’t know that I have a magic formula, but I’m happy to share how I studied. I’ve been practicing about 20 years and was working full time, so I started studying almost 4 months out and tried to put in at least 4 hours a day at least 5 days a week. I used Themis bar review and did watch all of the lectures and complete all of the lecture outlines. I only perused the big outlines. Literally spent no more than 30 minutes on any of those.
While watching the videos I took a ton of practice quizzes, both MBE and Florida multiple choice quizzes. Themis gives you quite a few Florida quizzes. I’ve heard other bar reviews do not. It helped a lot. I spent very little time doing practice essays beyond just reading them and maybe making some notes on how I would answer them. This worked for me just because I think I’m a decent writer and pretty good at organizing my thoughts quickly.
About a month before the test I condensed the lecture outlines into flash cards and highlighted some areas I wasn’t confident I already knew very well.
About two weeks before the test I spent all day everyday studying just flash cards and the highlighted portions of my outlines, basically memorizing about 6 subjects a day and then going back and re-reviewing over the two weeks.
I passed both portions so this seemed to work for me at least. My years of practice really only gave me a leg up on Civ Pro, evidence and torts.