Top Law Schools

Can anyone who thought they failed (or seriously might fail) the CBX after they took it, but ended up passing, share their experience? Would be great if you could share what you thought went wrong (e.g., ran out of time on MPT or missed issue X) and what you think helped you pass.

Thanks!

On the July 2017 CA bar, I had like 45 minutes remaining to do the PT. Probably had 30 minutes when I wasted 15 minutes to sheer terror/panic. I probably wrote like 2 full paragraphs at most. I knew I bombed the PT, which only increased my anxieties about how I did on the MBE and essays.

Long story short... I failed the July bar. But only by 25 points. It confirmed to me that I was on the right track with my MBE/essays and if I had just scored 60 on the PT, I would probably have passed. This gave me the encouragement + kick in the butt I needed to give it my all for the Feb 2018 CA bar (which I passed).

I took the CA bar in July 2011. Practiced countless essays and over a dozen (at least) PT exams. First day of exam, there was a significant Property Essay where (I realized after the fact) I completely missed two major issues. Also had a significant Contract Essay which pretty much hit almost everything you could think for Contracts. While I thought I did very well on it, I realized later that I missed a remedies issue. But still felt okay about the exam up to that point until......

First PT exam - It was like one of my nightmares of completely screwing up the exam came true. I completely screwed up my outline and thus failed to organize my thoughts (and writing) properly. As I tried to get my thoughts together and started writing, about halfway through the PT I realized that I totally messed up addressing the issues in the order they should have been addressed. So I basically back peddled and attempted to revise it so that it was organized correctly. After spending an undetermined amount of time cleaning up my mess, I then realized that I never set my timekeeper. Consequently, I had no idea how much time I had left, but assumed that I was racing against the clock with still half of the PT exam to finish....

After i scrambled and rushed through the remainder of the PT exam; and quickly looked over it (which made me feel even worse as I couldn't believe I wrote something so incoherent and unintelligible) there was a time announcement made .....30 minutes left. As if I did not think it could get any worse, I suddenly felt like my entire body was about to disintegrate. With 30 minutes left, I realized that it was too much time for me to be finished; and not enough time to correct all my mistakes..... So, I quickly went over it, made what changes I could and resigned myself to the horrible belief that I failed the bar exam.....

I went back to my room and just sat in complete shock and felt completely defeated. I actually contemplated not returning the next day as I was 100% sure I failed. But, fortunately, I convinced myself that at the very least I should try my best for the other 2 days to see if I my inevitable failure was indeed due to the horrible PT, or if there was something more fundamentally wrong so that I could prepare myself better for the February exam.

Next day, I felt good about my performance on the MBE (but not amazing); and the third and final day, when all my nerves were completely shot and I felt like I just did not care anymore, I tackled the essays and prepared myself for the final PT exam (which I felt really good about, even though I once again finished it with a significant amount of time to spare - I believe I was among the first 10 who finished out of 1200 ppl - which made me feel nervous).

So after the exam was over, I did what everyone does (besides a lot of drinking); I went over the exam in my head, and once again convinced myself that my performance on Day 1 was so horrible that I MUST have failed......

However...... to my absolute surprise, I PASSED.

While I will never know how I actually did on the exam, I am absolutely confident that I completely bombed the first PT. Thus, that goes to show you that as long as you do your best, even if you believe you performed poorly on some portions of the exam, there is still hope....

What I think helped me pass was calming myself down and basically forcing myself to forget about my horrible Day 1 performance, and just keep trying my best; treating each subsequent day of the exam like it had nothing to do with the rest of it.

Good luck!!!

Thanks for all the posts so far. I had a rough time with the PT and forgot to raise an important issue on an essay. Definitely helps to know that it isn't entirely hopeless.

Has anyone checked out this CA Bar Score calculator? https://ubeessays.com/california-score-calculator/

I've been playing around with it recently and it seems...generous. For instance, it says you can score straight 60's on each of the essays and PT, and get a 1500 on the MBE and still pass (total exam score 1443). Or, scoring 65's on 3 essays and 60's on 2 essays and a 60 on the PT and a 1440 on the MBE still equals a passing overall score of 1445.78.

I was told we need to score an average of 62.5% on the essays and a 1440 on the MBE (which is around ~67% correct). Then I looked up the average MBE for all CA schools, which in 2017 was 1478 for first timers and 1440 for all takers. Source: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... chool.html

Something doesn't add up here. Does the NCBE adds points to everyone's MBE score in the scaling process such that a ~67% is scaled to a much higher score than 1440 (there's no way the average score for all takers including nonaccredited grads/multiple retakers is 67%)? Can someone explain?