Curious about Kaplan Bar Prep Forum

[ManLaw]

I'm looking to take the California Bar exam Feb 2013. I passed the MN bar exam July 2011 using BarBri, and had an unsuccessful outing on the CA Bar exam July 2010 using BarBri (I blame a lackluster study effort, and laptop crashing the last day and having to handwrite for 6 hours. ) I'm curious about Kaplan this long winter as I won't be able to attend lectures anyways.


My preparation will have to be 100% online as I will be studying for it in Minnesota. On Kaplan's website they claim to have more realistic MBE questions, unlimited graded essays, and it is going to cost me about $1500 less. What is the catch?!?! Anyone prepped with both BarBri and Kaplan and can offer a comparison?

Thanks!

[I.P. Daly]

I used Kaplan to prepare for New York. I thought the MBE stuff (PMBR) was pretty good, and the MBE lectures were relatively easy to sit through. I attended a BarBri weekend "bootcamp" hosted at my school. The platform seemed almost identical to Kaplan, but I don't have any actual experience with BarBri.

You can get a feel for the Kaplan platform from their youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/KaplanBarRe ... ture=watch

Several of my friends used BarBri for the main course material, and Kaplan PMBR (not the full bar prep course) to review MBE questions. I understand that there are stylistic differences between the BarBri and Kaplan MBE questions, and several of my friends advised me that they thought the mixture of questions helped them on the actual MBE.

I understand that relativity recently, the founder of PMBR (Robert Feinberg) left Kaplan for BarBri. Perhaps that may have an influence on both companies on their MBE questions?

[ManLaw]

Thanks for that....I'm watching these now....What'd you think of the "unlimited grading of essays"? Did they respond to you fast?

I'm also wondering, do they send you any sort of reference book that includes all of the subjects? BarBri would have a "mini review" and a larger book for looking up specifics. Don't see any mention of any book included with Kaplan?

[I.P. Daly]

If you go with Kaplan, I'd recommend submitting a lot of essays for grading because some of the graders are not very helpful, while others provided excellent advice. However, I don't think essay grading is a necessary part of the course, as I thought the model answers were sufficient.

For New York, Kaplan provides a set of MBE books, a set of New York specific books (which also detail the NY v. MBE distinctions), and a book called "Bar Points" (a condensed outline of everything (I referred to this book the most)).

The one thing Kaplan could probably do better is use more mnemonics. Although they offer some, a friend shared a list of mnemonics that he received from the Pieper review course. I thought the mnemonics were invaluable during the exam. Of course, people can also make their own mnemonics using a scrabble word generator.

[ManLaw]

Thanks, that's helpful info!