Smiddywesson wrote:oldmanroyal wrote:Been 14 years since I past the bar, almost 5 years since I practiced. I'm looking for best advice to get the MBE subjects back in my brain. Any suggestions for relearning (basically from scratch) the material?
Yes, I was out of the law for 30 years. It's easy to get back to this if you know where to begin. If you want a program, I'd recommend JoeSeparac. If you are going it on your own, start with the four OPE Online Exams published by the NCBE. They should reflect the material in the subject matter outline. After that, I'd use a combination of Adaptibar and Barbri questions.
When using Adaptibar, I made four Word documents and cut and paste any rules or tips I derived from reading the answers. Read the answers. If you read all of them, they will correct for what are occasionally weak explanations. I reviewed these seven outlines, deleting items as I mastered them, thereby creating condensed outlines as exam day approached.
Initially, you are going to have to push to stay within time limits. I read the short fact patterns slow, and the long ones fast. There are a LOT of simple fact patterns with red herrings that waste a boatload of time. Burn through those bad boys. It's counterintuitive, but you have to do it. I also read the call once, after the fact pattern. A lot of people tell you to read it first, but I kept records, and that didn't help all that often, certainly not enough to counteract the problem of reading it first increases the number of dumb mistakes. You can't read it twice at first, even if it only takes ten seconds, 10 x 200 questions equals 33 minutes in a six hour test.
Finally, your time will greatly improve, thereby allowing you to read the call twice, and all of the answers, even when you think you know which one is correct. That also increases your score.
Finally, understand this is a frustrating process. You WILL, for example, get worse at CivPro as you add Property, and continue to backslide every time you add another subject. Most importantly, understand that this is not a linear process, so you won't see steady improvement until the end. One day you will be a hero, and the next day you will be a dummy. That's normal too.
Protect your psyche. When I was tired or hung over, I did more research and study and less questions. There's so much that goes into performance, you don't want to beat yourself up over the obvious. You will also hit barriers along the way. I hit a plateau at 68%, 75%, and 85%. I finished in the low 90s by changing my time management and instituting the aforementioned methods. There's really no limit on how well you do, the real issue is you just run out of time.
Use the analytics, they will help you sleep at night when you see how wretched everyone is, and steer you in the right direction with studying subtopics.
Good luck.
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I keep thinking about that broken laptop and what could have gone better on the essays. On the other hand, I found this great thread yesterday from 2016. It was titled something like "horror stories and still passed." Talk about uplifting, every one of these stories is amazing. All we do is torture ourselves while waiting for grades over what went wrong, and then this thread comes along with people pouring their hearts out about how bad the bar went and yet they still passed. It's a must read, so I bumped it up the front page. 
All the best tomorrow 
