July 2016 Texas Bar Exam Forum

[FloridaBoy]

Ahhhhhh great point, i appreciate that. I guess ill have to give her a call tomorrow. Do they send you a letter if your C&F is approved?

[BVest]

They used to, but I think now they might just email you that you have a new message to download from efast.

[0lol]

Anyone wanna split up writing model answers for the P&E by year?

[FloridaBoy]

Anyone wanna split up writing model answers for the P&E by year?

I'm going through the Barbri books and creating an outline as i go. I"m starting to see a pattern after going over 8 of them so far. I think the best way to learn is to do it yourself. I figured if i dont pass this go around, ill have some great outlines to use the next time.

[0lol]

yeah i mean, doing it urself is def the way to go

hopefully i can plow through like half of them

but time is so limited right now and i would hate to waste days and days on 10% of the overall grade, esp cause itll prob only affect my overall score by like 1-3%

[0lol]

going super heavy on MBE cause the diff between <130 & >150, for me atleast, is prob the diff from failing no matter what and passing no matter what

[Kragoth180]

Does anyone happen to know whether we will take the MPT or P&E first (the first morning)?

[BVest]

Does anyone happen to know whether we will take the MPT or P&E first (the first morning)?

I seem to recall MPT first.

e: Also note that you can't get up between MPT and P/E. You have to stay seated while they collect the MPT booklets (and handwritten MPTs) and count them all.

e2: The P/E answers are now limited to 360 characters if you type. (It was 460 in Feb; prior to that you had to handwrite). If you handwrite, you are limited to the five ruled lines they give you. Take that into consideration when deciding whether you wish to write or type the P/E exam.

[Kragoth180]

Does anyone happen to know whether we will take the MPT or P&E first (the first morning)?

I seem to recall MPT first.

e: Also note that you can't get up between MPT and P/E. You have to stay seated while they collect the MPT booklets (and handwritten MPTs) and count them all.

e2: The P/E answers are now limited to 360 characters if you type. (It was 460 in Feb; prior to that you had to handwrite). If you handwrite, you are limited to the five ruled lines they give you. Take that into consideration when deciding whether you wish to write or type the P/E exam.

Alrighty, guess there's no use in cramming P&E into short-term memory on the morning of. Also, I like having to write less! Thanks for the info!

[FloridaBoy]

going super heavy on MBE cause the diff between <130 & >150, for me atleast, is prob the diff from failing no matter what and passing no matter what

I dont know about that. No doubt the MBE will help you, but the P&E is like picking up 3 essays, that's a quarter of the essay portion. So that being said, a strong MBE (140+) and a strong P&E, you should be in a better position to do not as strong on the essay. At least thats my plan.

[umstah]

hey guys, just wanted to get some suggestions regarding scheduling.

So at this point i've just finished covering the MBE sections - i know them all pretty decently, just planning on spending ~2 hours everyday doing problems and reviewing them. I'm now planning to tackle the essays - do I have enough time to do this properly (i.e., watch the barbri lectures in addition to reading conviser) or should i just be reading the conviser and doing as many essay outlines as possible and reading old answers? I also need to tackle the p&e and was thinking about devoting 2 hours a day for that, making the daily breakdown 6 hours for essays, 2 for mbe, 2 for p&e, and ~0-2 for whatever spills over. i've also been unsure how to approach memorizing the p&e section so suggestions would be welcome.

[FloridaBoy]

hey guys, just wanted to get some suggestions regarding scheduling.

So at this point i've just finished covering the MBE sections - i know them all pretty decently, just planning on spending ~2 hours everyday doing problems and reviewing them. I'm now planning to tackle the essays - do I have enough time to do this properly (i.e., watch the barbri lectures in addition to reading conviser) or should i just be reading the conviser and doing as many essay outlines as possible and reading old answers? I also need to tackle the p&e and was thinking about devoting 2 hours a day for that, making the daily breakdown 6 hours for essays, 2 for mbe, 2 for p&e, and ~0-2 for whatever spills over. i've also been unsure how to approach memorizing the p&e section so suggestions would be welcome.

umstah, Sounds like a good plan. But id focus on the P&E now for memorization. Then as we get closer to the exam start to focus more on the essays and just do a refreshing up on the P&E.

[0lol]

today: 12 hours of MBE studying
tomorrow: 12 hours of essay studying
Sunday: 12 hours P&E (havent even touched it)

[fly_lawy3r]

Anyone else doing Barbri and feel woefully unprepared for the essays? Barbri does assigns practice essays, yes, but it's almost like they assign them expecting us to have memorized most of what we need to know law-wise by this point. I've really had to go out of my way and spend an extra few hours per day this week just to play catch-up and really learn the law for the essays.

Bar exam is still 2+ weeks out but damn, I feel like there is still SO much ground to cover with the essays. Definitely skipping tomorrow's practice MPT to work on essay stuff.

[NolanRyan]

Anyone else doing Barbri and feel woefully unprepared for the essays? Barbri does assigns practice essays, yes, but it's almost like they assign them expecting us to have memorized most of what we need to know law-wise by this point. I've really had to go out of my way and spend an extra few hours per day this week just to play catch-up and really learn the law for the essays.

Bar exam is still 2+ weeks out but damn, I feel like there is still SO much ground to cover with the essays. Definitely skipping tomorrow's practice MPT to work on essay stuff.

I literally feel the EXACT same! But I think they throw in the essays so now that when we look at them we might remember stuff from June. I don't know. This is hell.

[Federalist]

Anyone else doing Barbri and feel woefully unprepared for the essays? Barbri does assigns practice essays, yes, but it's almost like they assign them expecting us to have memorized most of what we need to know law-wise by this point. I've really had to go out of my way and spend an extra few hours per day this week just to play catch-up and really learn the law for the essays.

Bar exam is still 2+ weeks out but damn, I feel like there is still SO much ground to cover with the essays. Definitely skipping tomorrow's practice MPT to work on essay stuff.

I literally feel the EXACT same! But I think they throw in the essays so now that when we look at them we might remember stuff from June. I don't know. This is hell.

I feel exactly the same way. Did good on UCC and Family Law essays. Not so good on Consumer Law and Real Property. Should we focus on memorizing instead of writing?

[fly_lawy3r]

I literally feel the EXACT same! But I think they throw in the essays so now that when we look at them we might remember stuff from June. I don't know. This is hell.

Definitely possible. It's just frustrating because during that simulated essay we had the other day, I remembered virtually nothing from trusts and couldn't even take a stab at that essay. I just flat-out couldn't write anything coherent. I want so bad to "trust the Barbri process" like everyone keeps telling me to do, but it just seems like there is so much ground to cover in such a short period of time...

I feel exactly the same way. Did good on UCC and Family Law essays. Not so good on Consumer Law and Real Property. Should we focus on memorizing instead of writing?

My thought is that we really can't write much unless we know the substantive law, but we also need to be getting comfortable with writing in bar exam essay format, so it makes it tricky. The past couple days I've been writing a few mostly-open-book essays on my own time, but obviously we need to be rapidly getting to the point where we can write these things closed book, so who knows if it's the right approach.

TBH, I would LOVE to see what some actual passing bar exam essays look like, instead of just the Barbri ones (which probably teeter on unrealistic).

[BVest]

TBH, I would LOVE to see what some actual passing bar exam essays look like, instead of just the Barbri ones (which probably teeter on unrealistic).

https://ble.texas.gov/selected-answers

[fly_lawy3r]

TBH, I would LOVE to see what some actual passing bar exam essays look like, instead of just the Barbri ones (which probably teeter on unrealistic).

https://ble.texas.gov/selected-answers

Extremely helpful! Thanks. Can't believe I didn't know about this before.

[NolanRyan]

BVest: what did you do the last two weeks?

[0lol]

just looked over feb 16 P&E

not nearly as scary as i thought it would be

[0lol]

anyone wanna get together sometime within the next week to talk about the exam/prep/strategy/etc?

In dallas. PM me

[BVest]

BVest: what did you do the last two weeks?

By this time I was focused on essay questions and P/E, and just doing about 35-50 MBE questions a day as a bit of maintenance. Mainly I was trying to learn UCC-3, Trusts/Estates, Family Law, and DTPA.

For all of the above I did as many past P/E and essays (of all types) as I could. I wrote out all of my essay answers rather than simply outlining, mainly because even when I started outlining, my outlines took paragraph form (I'm a terrible outliner).

And I worked on getting the BLL for the most tested topics from the subjects above (which were the classes I did not take in LS) into 2-3 page handwritten outlines/diagrams/charts each. I memorized the shit out of those pages, including Wednesday night before Thursday essays, to the point that I couldn't have told you on Friday what had been on those pages.

(Don't discount the study time you have the week of the exam, however, plan down-time and early bedtimes in there as well. I used most of my week-of studying for P/E and essays; the only things I did for MBE was to look back over my charts for Con Law (e.g. scrutiny levels)).

[AllDangle]

Right now I want to assign myself one essay topic per day to go back and review/memorize notes and then look at essays. But doing this isn't in line with BarBri. Should I feel sketched out about just essentially bailing on BarBri right now to focus on what I think I need most (memorizing essay BLL)?

[BVest]

At this point, I was using my barbri plan (both overdue and future assignments) as a to-do list to be done in no particular order.