Raw MBE conversion Forum

[RaceJudicata]

Does anyone have good information on this? What percentage should I be shooting for? FWIW, using barbri and Adaptibar (I know barbri are considered "harder").

Can't seem to find any good information on this... maybe it doesn't exist?

[MrT]

Does anyone have good information on this? What percentage should I be shooting for? FWIW, using barbri and Adaptibar (I know barbri are considered "harder").

Can't seem to find any good information on this... maybe it doesn't exist?

I know the Emmanuel's MBE book had a chart using historical data. Unfortunately I don't have the book anymore though.

[cnk1220]

Does anyone have good information on this? What percentage should I be shooting for? FWIW, using barbri and Adaptibar (I know barbri are considered "harder").

Can't seem to find any good information on this... maybe it doesn't exist?

Might be a little harder to find now that only 175 are graded...

[RaceJudicata]

Does anyone have good information on this? What percentage should I be shooting for? FWIW, using barbri and Adaptibar (I know barbri are considered "harder").

Can't seem to find any good information on this... maybe it doesn't exist?

Might be a little harder to find now that only 175 are graded...

Yes, this seems to be the case.

[Kalani111]

I think 70% overall is the safe zone.

[Toubro]

Does anyone have good information on this? What percentage should I be shooting for? FWIW, using barbri and Adaptibar (I know barbri are considered "harder").

Can't seem to find any good information on this... maybe it doesn't exist?

Yeah, there's a chart in Emanuel, but that is based on limited data the one time the Illinois board of law examiners released it. Also it was when there were only 10 rather than 25 pretest items.

It's really hard to say because they also throw items out, or sometimes they'll double key them.

Moreover, even if you COULD know for sure that "60% = 135 scaled," 60% on Barbri or Adaptibar =/= 60% right on the actual MBE. The 60% figure would be from a test constructed to meet various psychometric requirements (statistical stuff like reliability coefficients, standard errors, etc.) that I doubt commercial test prep companies meet or even attempt to meet. Even if they did either, the sample size just wouldn't be as large as the one NCBE enjoys. This btw is my theory as to why NCBE is so secretive about its scale unlike, say, LSAC, which releases the scale with EACH released PrepTest -- test takers would likely misuse the scale by applying it to simulated MBEs, or worse, subsets of MBE-like questions (such as Barbri's 18-item drills).

tl;dr: do the best you can. Unsatisfying, I know.

[JoeSeperac]

Since only 175 MBE questions will be graded on the upcoming UBE exam, you want to answer a minimum of 110 of these graded questions correctly (63%). According to a 1997 study entitled Basic Concepts in Item and Test Analysis, "the ideal percentage of correct answers on a four-choice multiple-choice test is not 70-90%. According to Thompson and Levitov (1985), the ideal difficulty for such an item would be halfway between the percentage of pure guess (25%) and 100%, (25% + {(100% - 25%)/2}. Therefore, for a test with 100 items with four alternatives each, the ideal mean percentage of correct items, for the purpose of maximizing score reliability, is roughly 63%."

I have a calculator for raw to scaled MBE conversions here:
http://www.seperac.com/zcalc-mbe-febjuly.php

[Tiredbuthappyitsover]

If using Barbri-you can usually add 15-20 points to your raw score to get the scaled score.