Neff wrote:Okay, so even though I've ranting about how crappy and fake Barbri Qs are, the OCD in me still forced myself to finish the simulated MBE today. Got a 126/200 (albeit done over two days), which is way better than I expected since I started out 26/50. I hated how the questions were either pretty easy or really hard (basically you had to know either a really obscure rule or read the writer's mind). It's like they were written by two totally different people. Never felt that way with the real Qs in Emanuel. Also I found AM (54/100) to be waaay harder than PM (72/100).
Now I feel like I'm way behind in state subjects and probably will do only an hour of MBE prep a day from now on, since I'm in a 40% MBE state and we have *16* non-MBE subjects to learn. I feel like a lot of us in those 40% or less states may be overdoing MBE at the expense of state subjects. But that's also mostly due to how Barbri is basically no help for state subjects besides video lectures, a shitty quiz, and essay assignments.
I also saw a sharp increase in my PM versus AM scores — something like 15 more correct — leaving me to think that the PM section was much easier. In fact, I got well over half of the questions wrong in the first column of 25 on the AM test. (At first, I had the distinct impression that I was grading with the wrong answer key!) Did anyone else find that the first two dozen questions on the AM exam were unusually difficult?
I also found the questions to be fairly easy or extremely difficult, but I sense the actual bar exam might be put together similarly (though with fewer very difficult questions). I remember hearing that getting 140 correct on the simulated MBE is 90th percentile or higher, with 150 correct being 98th percentile or higher. Can anyone who achieved such scores confirm this? Because these percentiles would confirm that a healthy portion of the Barbri questions are much, much harder than the actual MBE, where I think that high scaled scores (170+) are not so uncommon.
I'm spending a day or two going over the topics I got wrong on the simulated MBE and then moving on definitively to the state subjects. I agree that I have no idea how to prepare for the essay portion, though apparently memorizing rules and definitions verbatim is what is encouraged.