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Seperac is great. He produces an MEE Master Outline which compiles all the MEE essays and a sample answer. It's a wonderful resource.jtom195 wrote:Yeah, there's a lot out there for the MBE, not as much for the MEE. I'm looking for a prep course for the MEE or some good supplemental study guides for the MEE? Any suggestions?
Also take a look at JD Advising. They have a lot of UBE course options, some expensive and some less expensive. They have a number of tailored choices depending on what your weaknesses are and how much prep and/or tutoring you would like. There are full courses, but I took the MEE Seminar, which is a one day course where they send you MEE materials ahead of time. Instead of standard commercial outlines, they broke the topics down by issues of highly tested to lesser tested issues and indicated the tests that the issued showed up on. It was pretty helpful. https://www.excellenceinlawschool.com/jtom195 wrote:Yeah, there's a lot out there for the MBE, not as much for the MEE. I'm looking for a prep course for the MEE or some good supplemental study guides for the MEE? Any suggestions?
I second this; Seperac is awesome. I've taken three different states, and it used it for all of them.justwanttobealawyer wrote:Seperac is great. He produces an MEE Master Outline which compiles all the MEE essays and a sample answer. It's a wonderful resource.jtom195 wrote:Yeah, there's a lot out there for the MBE, not as much for the MEE. I'm looking for a prep course for the MEE or some good supplemental study guides for the MEE? Any suggestions?
Joe, I've heard so much about you, but does your program have essay grading too?JoeSeperac wrote:I have separate MEE materials for issue spotting and reviewing past MEEs (there is no better way to learn the exam than the exam itself).
Hey Joe!JoeSeperac wrote:No, I don’t grade essays. Joe Seperac’s subjective opinion of your essay might be a little better than Joe Schmoe’s, but it’s still a subjective opinion. According to NCBE, the reliability of the MBE scaled score is 0.90. NCBE found that for the essays to have a reliability of 0.90, they needed to be 16 hours long with 32 different essay questions. NCBE found that for the MPT to have a reliability of 0.90, it needed to be 33 hours long with 22 different MPT items. see The Bar Examiner: Volume 77, Number 3, August 2008. Unreliability in essay scoring means that you can have a very high essay score on one exam and then a very low essay score on another exam even though your level of knowledge has not changed (or even improved). Thus, answering only 6 essays and 2 MPTs make unreliability in essay scoring guaranteed. Unreliability in high-stakes exams makes it harder to distinguish applicants sufficiently to determine who is qualified versus unqualified (which is why the written scores are scaled to the MBE).
So how does unreliability in essay scoring occur? Let me give you an example. Take a look at the following essay grading analysis I made of a sample of J14 essays. You will need to Zoom in on this PDF to read the material (I try to put a number of essays on one page so it can be visually compared).
http://seperac.com/pdf/J14-Essay%20Anal ... ay%201.pdf
This PDF is a small sample of 15 answers from Essay 1 from the July 2014 exam. It contains obvious and serious mistakes in grading. As part of an essay analysis I conducted on the pre-UBE essays, I tried to determine the weight of each issue and calculate each examinee’s score for each issue (for example, PROF-RES: Solicitation/Referral Fees (Seperac Est. score of 2/10)). The final result was the “Seperac Estimated Score.” Bar graders have neither the time or the interest in putting similarly scored essays side by side to see if the grading is indeed accurate. However, when you do this, grading inaccuracies often come to light. For example, if you look at the 5th essay (Jul2014-Essay-001-ID 002-Typed-Score 38.66), this “Examinee J” received a score of 38.66. If you compare this essay to the other essays that scored around 38.66, you will see that this essay is far superior. I feel this essay score was severely discounted – just compare this essay to the released Model Answers and you will see what I mean. How this essay is not a passing essay is a complete mystery to me. Now let’s suppose that you studied heavily for this exam and put effort into the essays and you were the examinee that wrote the above essay in question. You would have written what was objectively a good essay that should have been well above passing, but instead would have received a terrible score. This is what no one can assess – the unreliability of subjective essay grading.
Luckily, the MEE questions are less prone to such unreliability because they are shorter and there is a grading rubric. Thus, if you have the released MEE questions, you can essentially grade yourself by comparing your answers to the NCBE answer analyses. According to the maker of the MEE: “NCBE’s grader training and materials also assign weights to subparts in a question. So an examinee who performs well on one subpart of an MEE question worth 25% of the total score that could be awarded for that question is not assured a 6 unless he performs well on the other parts of the question, too, in comparison with other examinees. In other words, there is a weighting framework for assigning points, which helps to keep graders calibrated and consistent.” see the March 2015 NCBE Testing Column: Judith A. Gundersen, The Testing Column, Essay Grading Fundamentals, The Bar Examiner (March 2015). This differs from pre-UBE essay grading where it appeared the graders reviewed the essays more holistically (i.e. looking at the overall answer and then assigning a score). On the MEE, the graders are somewhat constrained by the grading weights, meaning that a well written answer with good reasoning that misses issues will probably score lower than a poorly written answer with basic analysis that correctly identifies all the issues.
On the subscription site, I have comparisons that let you compare graded essays/MPTs. For example, following are small samples of the February and July 2010 MPT comparisons:
http://www.seperac.com/Feb2010Analysis/
http://www.seperac.com/examinees/JULY2010/
If you are willing to self-evaluate, you can write an answer to a comparison question and then compare your answer to other graded answers (one day I will have a automated way of doing this). For example, you can download the Feb 2010 MPT from NCBE’s website, answer the State of Franklin vs McLain MPT and then compare your answer to the graded ones in the comparison:
http://www.ncbex.org/pdfviewer/?file=%2 ... ment%2F178
If this is too much effort, you can simply look at passing and above-passing essays/MPTs. For example, one subscriber told me: “I think this helped me immensely, because although I had not practiced writing any essays, I still really got a feel for the tone, length, content and structure of passing answers which created a ‘voice’ in my head when writing essays.” Put simply, good essays/MPTs look like other good essays/MPTs.
jtom195 wrote:
Hey Joe!
Thanks for the information, this all sounds really good. Couple questions. Do we have to subscribe to your site to see the "good" and "bad" essay examples for comparison purposes? Are these different from the model answers released by the NCBE?
Thank you!
This is awesome! Thank you. I'm actually a first-time taker, but this definitely sounds like a great service for me to look into as I currently have very little to compare my practice essays to.JoeSeperac wrote:jtom195 wrote:
Hey Joe!
Thanks for the information, this all sounds really good. Couple questions. Do we have to subscribe to your site to see the "good" and "bad" essay examples for comparison purposes? Are these different from the model answers released by the NCBE?
Thank you!
The MEE and MPT Comparisons (which are based on graded examinee essays) are accessible by subscribers or non-subscribers who submit their essays to me for that exam. This is how it works:
1) If you fail the UBE exam and have a copy of your essays, you email them to me.
2) I transcribe your essays and statistically analyze them.
3) Once I have a large enough sample of essays (usually 20-30 examinees for a February exam or 50-60 examinees for a July exam), I create the MEE/MPT Analysis for that exam.
4) I then email you a free 37+ page essay analysis that statistically compares your MEE/MPT answers to everyone else who sent me their essays. A sample of the J16 Analysis (37 pages) is here:
http://www.seperac.com/pdf/Sample-Essay ... 202016.pdf
This MEE/MPT Analysis is confidential – I don't share your essays with anyone and no one else sees them. All I do is transcribe your essays and make the report once I have a large enough sample. NOTE: I plan to start comparing the MEE essays to the point sheets so the MEE section of the analysis will be similar to the MPT section of the analysis, giving you even more insight into your MEE/MPT answers.
5) When I send you the MEE/MPT Analysis, I ask you if you want to participate in the MEE/MPT Comparison. If you say No, nothing else happens with your essays and no one ever sees them except me. If you say Yes, I include your essays in the MEE/MPT Comparison which lets you see your answers compared to everyone else's side-by-side. Following are very small samples of my February and July 2010 MPT comparisons:
http://www.seperac.com/Feb2010Analysis/
http://www.seperac.com/examinees/JULY2010/
This Comparison is viewable by everyone who participates in it and also by subscribers. In the Comparison, everything is redacted (I even check your MPTs to make sure you didn't mention your name by mistake) so there is nothing to identify you. The majority of examinees decide to participate once they see their Analysis (out of the 500+ examinees that have sent me their essays for the Analysis, only 7 have opted out of the Comparison). I have been doing these Comparisons since 2010 and never has an examinee told me their confidentiality was compromised in any way.
6) If you participate in the Comparison, I give you a $40 coupon code if you decide to later subscribe to the full subscription site (where you can view the Comparisons for other exams).
Both the Analysis and the Comparison are great ways to get some useful insights into your MEEs/MPTs. For example, one of the more useful aspects of the MEE/MPT Analysis is a “Top 20 Words” analysis that reports the top 20 words the above average answers used that you did not. Through this “Top 20 Words” list, I find that failing examinees sometimes fail to use IRAC phrases such as “whether”, “here”, “therefore”, or “however.” This tells me the examinee’s essay is probably not as organized as it could be. Other times the examinees fail to use analysis words such as “because”, “since” , or “as.” In an IRAC analysis, “because” is the single most important word to use when analyzing the facts in the question. The failure to use words such as "because", "since" and "as" will negatively affect the analysis portion of your essay and can only hurt your score. Lastly, examinees often fail to use the legal terminology associated with a particular essay topic. I refer to these terms as “buzz-words.” I believe that graders do not spend a lot of time reviewing an essay, so the failure to use buzz-words (to signal to the grader that you understand the topic) can hurt your essay score. Put simply, absence of such words indicates the examinee may not be discussing things he/she needs to discuss.
The MEE/MPT Comparison is a fantastic way to visually identify what you did wrong on the MEE/MPT by looking at your essays side by side against others. You can look at exactly passing answers to see how much (or how little) is required for an exactly passing score. When you look at the text comparison, you start to see the commonality in language with high scoring answers – in a sense this trains you to include the same language in similar essays. The PDF comparisons (where you view the actual PDFs of the answers side by side) let you see each essay’s layout, structure, and formatting so you can visually learn how to emulate the high scoring answers (and conversely, avoid the styles of the low scoring answers). For example, one examinee (non-subscriber) who failed F15 told me: "I did much better on my essays this time due in large part to your comparison tool. I found that to be extremely helpful." For the F15 exam, this examinee's 5-Essay average was 53.74 (a passing essay average for the Feb 2015 exam was 51.43). Based on 196 submitted score reports, this 5-Essay average was ranked 9/196 (this means the examinee had a 5-Essay average better than 95.4% of the examinees that sent me their Feb 2015 score information). In July 2014, this examinee had a 5-Essay average was 45.22 (a passing essay average for the July 2014 exam was 47.83). Based on 315 submitted score reports, this 5-Essay average was ranked 131/315 (which was better than 58.4% of the examinees that sent me their July 2014 scores).
Thus, with the MEE/MPT Analysis you can statistically compare your MEEs/MPTs to other graded MEEs/MPTs while with the MEE/MPT Comparison, you can visually compare your MEEs/MPTs to other graded MEEs/MPTs. On the subscription site, I have Comparisons for the last 15 MPT exams but only the J16 MEE since NY only switched in J16 (F17 to follow soon). For example, with the July 2015 MPT Comparison (Opinion Letter), you can examine 63 graded MPTs (for a total of 1,800+ comparisons). For the July 2016 MEE Comparison, for each of the six MEE questions, there are 741 comparisons based on 33 examinee essays.