Chessiesmile wrote:Seriously guys, as long as you weren't completely and utterly off-track, you probably scored like a 4 or 5 on any given essay.  (And even so, as long as you spit out enough buzzwords, the same applies.)  Do not beat yourself up about missing a couple issues.  I'm not exaggerating about what I said above.  
So long as you hit 140+ on the MBE, you're in a very good spot to pass.  150+ and it's almost a lock.
I keep hearing stuff like this, but I'm still crazy nervous.  There's a lot that bothers me:
1. First-time February takers in  New York pass at a significantly lower rate than July first-timers.  Does anyone know why that is?  It seems really bizarre to me.
2. The lack of examples/transparency of how essays are graded.  I have no idea what exactly constitutes a 4 as compared to a 5 as compared to a 6, etc.  I think that I got the rules 
exactly right on only 2/5 essays. On some sub questions, I guesstimated a rule which sounded right and actually turned out to be somewhat correct, but I think it will be obvious that I didn't know the rule as well as the others. On another, I later realized I wrote the wrong rule entirely. On yet another sub issue, I think I wrote some weird hybrid version of the correct law and something else entirely. 
While studying with Kaplan, my essays scores ranged fairly wildly (the first was a 3, the rest were between 4s and 8s...) In that regard, I have no idea what to expect from the actual BOLE graders. In general, I thought the selection of essay topics was odd.
3. The lack of an instant grading from the MBE.  While doing the Kaplan 200 question midterm and final, I genuinely had no idea what to expect right before hitting "submit."  There were certainly several handfuls of questions where I had to narrow it down to 2, and then guess.  I ended up with a 127 on the Kaplan final.  They implied that it was a decent score, but I really didn't feel confident that part of it wasn't sheer luck.  I wonder how much luck I had on the real deal!