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anxious 3L taking a few diagnostic MBEs before bar prep officially starts. They're bad. I know this is a reflection of zero studying at this point, but I'm wondering how passers diagnostics improved from the start of your bar prep and throughout bar prep and whether your practice exams accurately reflected your performance on the bar.

What MBE program are you doing? Adaptibar?

my law school offered a 2 credit bar prep semester course that is Kaplan based so I've taken a handful of Kaplan practice MBES (full diagnostics as well as subject specific)

Used Themis. On their simulated practice test I scored a 148 raw. On the mixed topic practice sets, I was generally scoring around 70-72%.

On the actual MN bar, I scored at 167.6 scaled. They don't release raw scores, so I don't know what the exact scaling factor was, but I was probably right around where my practice scores were. I found that my scores tended to improve as I studied up until about a month before the exam and then kind of plateaued. I started at about 60-65% and studying raised that to about where I ended up on the actual exam.

I scored 40% raw on ncbe questions with zero studying. Then with Themis scored 117 raw on the diagnostic mid way through. I averaged 65% on themis questions during the last weeks. Then scored 142 scaled during the actual exam.

To practice MBE is important. Don't think you can do it at last minute. I did kaplan final simulated exam and scored 110. In the final exam I scored 126. I passed the bar because I memorised the barbri essay book and was more confident in answering essays than mbe. That's a bad score but I guess it would give you an indication as to how much you would score in the final exam and help you focus on your weak areas. Do the final simulated exam atleast 3-4 weeks before exam so that you have time to improve.

Also make a rules sheet for all the questions you guessed or got wrong and review them at the end.

As many said try adaptibar becoz a majority have used. I have not used it so I don't know much about it. I did kaplan (100%) and barbri (20%) and I liked barbri explanations more than kaplan but I had no time to do all barbri.

I scored below 50% on all my diagnostics and practice MBEs with Barbri. My actual MBE score was much, much higher and I passed the bar with tons of room to spare. To this day I believe these practice exams intentionally create test anxiety and force over-studying to ensure bar passage. Maybe I just got lucky but I doubt it.

There are nifty google spreadsheets floating around in some of the past bar exam threads (February 2016 and July 2015 for sure), where TLS-ers self reported their mid-term MBE scores and their final MBE scores on bar day. Its worth taking a look at for perspective.

As for my own experience, I jumped about 40 points from my mid-term MBE to the February 2016 exam. I was a first-time bar examinee, and a December 2015 graduate (a full semester early, as I was a part-time student who switched to full time in my 4L year). Offering some brutal advice here: don't freak out about low diagnostics, but don't rest on your laurels either. Work at it, and do what worked for you in law school (I did both flashcards and an outline).