MBE Changes for July 29, 2009

We would like everyone to be alerted to the changes on the MBE, effective, this July, so that all law school graduates will be prepared.

For those not taking the commercial bar review courses, studying on their own and/or who may be using materials from prior years, please be aware of these changes in the 200 question format of the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE):

1. There will be No “none of the above” or “all of the above” answer choices.
2. There will be no “if” or “unless” in the answer choices.
3. The MBE examiners will not use names, but will use common nouns (e.g. a painter, not Pat the painter).
4. There will be no roman numeral or “K-type” questions (e.g., I is true, but II and III are not true).
5. There will be no series of questions relating to a fact pattern. Instead, only one question will relate to one fact pattern.

I wonder if this will make the MBE harder or easier to understand? Knowing the MBE, I think it will make the MBE harder.

I think most are just cosmetic changes, for example, using plaintiff or defendant instead of some ridiculous sounding names. For my final exam one semester, just to mess with my students, I used all of their names in my fact pattern. I didn’t know if the student would be distracted by it, but they were actually quite pleased. I was surprised at their reactions. A few even came up to me to thank me for making them the DA or the mayor or something equally important sounding. Of course, I made sure none of them were the criminal defendants.

Using “none of the above” or “all of the above” in the answer choices could sometimes be tricky as well as the roman numeral or K-type questions, but I always found , the “if” or “unless” changes to the fact pattern to sometimes be so tricky, you end up blowing the question. I think it was wise to get rid of the “if” and “unless” questions.

The most significant change and, I think, probably the most interesting change, is the series of question for one fact pattern. I think we all went through law school with those types of questions. The one problem with them is that if you didn’t read the question thoroughly, just glanced at it, or missed something significant in the fact pattern, you could blow 3 or 4 questions off of just one fact pattern. The upside was you only had to read a fact pattern once and you could blow by 3 or 4 questions quickly, earning some breathing room for the 100 questions per session. I wonder now if this will end up hurting the slower reading applicants or if it will help them. I guess we’ll see how the MBE scores changes next September and October.