How Much Study Time Do You Devote to Your Bar Exam Preparation?

Students ask me how much study time is really needed to pass the bar. I don’t think there is a ready-made answer for how much time you should spend on your studies for the bar exam. I’ve known successful applicants who have studied 8 hours a day and I’ve known applicants who were unsuccessful despite studying 15 hours a day.

You definitely don’t want to burn yourself out prior to the bar but you don’t want to be unprepared for the exam, either.

You have had the opportunity now to study for the last few weeks. You need to ask yourself how well you are learning or reviewing the subject materials. Are you mired down in the outlines, are you having trouble memorizing the elements of a tort? Are you getting enough practice questions in during the day? Do you traditionally have trouble testing? The obvious answer then becomes what you think you need now. My advice is to work hard and long now and once you know the materials, and once you start to feel more comfortable with the exam preparation, then you can become less strict as the bar gets nearer.

Those who are using the commercial bar review classes have a full 4 hour block of time where they are listening passively to a lecture. It’s a good time for review of your outlines, but you’ll need the rest of the day to actively work on preparation, for example, by doing practice questions and essays or performance memos.

Those who are not in commercial bar review classes or when bar review classes are not in session, have the whole day to enact your study plan. Start working the bar time. You know that you’ll be in the bar from 9-12:00 and then from 12:30 – 4:30. You’ll need to practice sitting still, focusing on your materials and concentrating for those 3 hour stretches without a break. It’s actually going to be hard for you in the beginning. Start trying to do so. You can do a 3 hour stretch, take an hour or an hour and a half as a break, then go back to 3 hours then break again and then do another 2 or 3 hour stretch. As the weeks go by, work the actual bar schedule, only taking a half hour break so you’ll be ready for bar exam day.

The Bar Exam Jitters: Controlling Your Anxiety

I saw one of my students yesterday in the midst of an anxiety attack. Despite studying diligently for the last few weeks, and despite earning the highest final exam grade in my class, she was a bundle of nerves and tension wondering how she was going to learn everything for the bar exam. She kept telling me that the exam was only 6 weeks away.

Sound familiar? You all will go through those jitters and fears until the exam. You will continuously ask yourself, am I studying enough? Do I know enough? How will I learn everything I need to learn? Why is the time going so slowly and then so fast?

Your anxiety is normal, but do not let that nervousness overwhelm you. It is completely natural to have test anxiety.

Yes, studying for the bar exam is not fun. It is tedious, hard work and you feel like the whole world is passing you by while you are miserable. But remember your ultimate goal. After this experience you will fulfill your dream of being a lawyer. And, in most cases, this will be the only bar exam you have to take unless you plan to leave the jurisdiction.

Try to Stay Calm

If you have too much anxiety, you will not be able to study efficiently or effectively. Too much anxiety will have a detrimental effect on your preparation and your performance. You cannot absorb the law if you are completely stressed. Try relaxation exercises or do something you like to do as a reward for a good study day. If you like watching a particular tv show, record it and watch it on one of your breaks as a reward. If you want to watch the playoffs, get up early or make up those 3 hours or, better yet, watch the 4th quarter only. Save an hour for exercise if that relaxes your mind.

Be diligent and disciplined and you’ll start to feel less stressed out.

Know the Exam Like the Back of Your Hand

To lessen your anxiety, you need to boost your confidence about the bar exam. You can only achieve this by taking the time to understand the tested material, answering practice questions, and becoming familiar with the organization of the bar exam.. The more confident you are about the exam, the less likely you will be to experience test anxiety.

Another thing you can do to ease your nerves is make sure you won't be in for any surprises the day of the exam. You should drive by the test facility a few days before your scheduled exam date and locate everything you need for the test (like your identification and admission ticket) and set it aside. Be sure you get a good night's sleep the night before so you can wake up with enough time to get ready. If you're going to be traveling to the test center during rush hour, give yourself plenty of time to arrive early.

Be Confident in Yourself and Your Abilities

You have been successful your whole life. You did well in college, got into law school, studied and clawed your way to a degree, and you can pass the bar exam. Remember, you don’t have to be a genius to pass the bar, you have to put in the time and the hard work. Tell yourself often that you can pass this bar exam.

Keep Your Mind in the Game

Keep thinking of your ultimate goal of beating the bar and becoming a lawyer. Visualize yourself as being smart at the bar exam, answering the questions easily. Visualize yourself telling your parents or your loved ones that you passed the bar.

Remember to Believe in Yourself. You Can and You Will Pass the Bar

MBE Questions: How Much Testing Should You Do?

When you take the MBE portion of the bar, you must average 34 questions per hour to answer all 100 questions in the allotted 3 hours. You must make sure on the day of the MBE exam, you do not run out of time. Yes, it’s imperative that you answer the MBE correctly, but it is also imperative that you have an opportunity to answer every question. You cannot allow yourself to run out of time and potentially fail to answer 5 to 10 questions that you didn’t get to. Even if you don’t know the answer, you can at least narrow the answer choices to 2 and make an educated guess. If you don’t read the question, you can’t even make an educated guess.

Make an ultimatum to yourself today that you will read and answer all the MBE questions per session at the exam site.

It’s a difficult endeavor and you must practice every day to get yourself ready for the MBE marathon.

How do you practice the MBE effectively and efficiently?

First, I would recommend you practice the MBE in ½ hour increments, for now. Ordinarily that would mean you need to do 17 questions per half hour. The stress of the actual test will make you work slower, so you’ll need to practice more questions per half hour. If you perfect a pace of say 19 or 20 questions per half hour, then come test time you’ll average your 17 questions per half hour.

Until you get used to all this extra study and practice time, try 3 to 4 sets of half hour tests, per study day, doing 19-20 questions at a time. Do not interrupt that time with bathroom breaks or phone calls or eating a snack while you are testing yourself. Time yourself, as it is very important that you keep up with the strict time limits of MBE testing. Do not cheat on the time. Yes, it is going to be very hard in the beginning, but with enough practice, you’ll find yourself getting through the questions faster and with more ease.

Once you finish your 19-20 questions, look over every single answer, even the ones you got right. You want to make sure you understand the reasoning behind the correct answer, even your right answers. If there is a point of law you don’t understand, write it down or try to memorize that point of law. You may want to go over to your study guide and re-read that section of the law.

Right now, the MBE testing will be like running in sand. You are going to frustrated and tired. Some days or some sessions you’ll do fine, other days and other testing sessions will leave you convinced you don’t know a thing about the law. You will be inconsistent and irritated. But don’t get discouraged, you will get better at them and the questions will start to become easier for you. Conversely, don’t get over confident. A few good scores does not make a passing score. Keep practicing. Your practice times will make you stronger for the actual test, and, believe it or not, you will actually start to see patterns and stock answers that you will know can’t be right. The MBE questions are like doing cross word puzzles. The same clues and answers will start to repeat themselves and you’ll discover the tricks the MBE examiners use to distract you from the right answer.

Practice, practice, practice and you’ll conquer the MBE test as you earn your way to your bar license.

A Tale Between Two Bar Exam Components – MBE and Essay Questions or Performance Tests

A bar exam has two or for those states that have the performance exam, 3 different bar components. How do you sufficiently study and cover all the components of your bar exam?

I find that most of the commercial bar review courses rely heavily on teaching the MBE law and its strategies for the MBE, which is, of course, essential to passing the bar. Unfortunately, those same commercial bar review courses do not treat the essay or performance component nearly as comprehensively as it does the MBE.
Treating the essay or performance component as an afterthought is a danger you do not want to put yourself in. Let’s look briefly at the Florida bar. The Florida bar is a cumulative bar. The applicant does not have to pass both sections; she just has to get a total point score of 272.

The Florida section consists of 3 essays and 100 multiple choice questions. If the applicant does well on the essays, she can bring a number of points to the MBE score to ensure that, even if she does not pass the MBE of 136 points, she can still pass if she does well on the essays. Of course, the reverse is true – if she can do well on the MBE, she can bring the points to a weaker essay score.

One of the reasons why the MBE is hard is because you either get the answer right or wrong. If you get the answer wrong, you get no points. For an essay or performance question, you can beat around the bush a bit and still get some points. That’s why writing a good essay or good performance memo/brief can be a strategically good move.
How do you get enough study time for your essays and/or performance component in sight of the high demands of the MBE?

You must take time to prepare for your essays and/or performance component. Do not allow the bar review courses to take away from the necessity of studying for those components.

You must do MBE testing every day. I’ll discuss, in a few days, about how to maximize your MBE testing.

In addition to the MBE, I recommend that you do at least 3 or 4 essays and/or performance tests per week. By testing day, you will have done 24 essays and/or performance memos that will hold you in good stead for the exam. Try to do an essay every other day and do at least one essay or memo on Saturday and one more on Sunday. Since you will not have bar review classes on the weekend, you have 12 -13 hours to write and review your essay or memo. You can spare the hour and a half to devote to your essay or memo.

Don’t take the essay and/or performance test for granted. You are going to want the maximum points possible from those writing assignments.

Your Job This Summer is to Study

Your full-time job this summer IS studying for the Bar Exam. There is no ifs or buts about this. You need to be clear headed, dedicated, persistent, unyielding and your thoughts of “bar” need to be all encompassing.

The reason a person fails the bar is not because he or she is not smart enough. We all know plenty of people that we are shocked when that person passed the bar. They were the ones who we thought were dumb in law school, wasn’t in law review, wasn’t running in the right circles, etc. Whatever the reason, we knew that person could not pass the bar because he or she didn’t have it. Well, what they had was a plan of action that gave them ample opportunity to learn the materials necessary to pass the bar.

A person does not pass the bar for many reasons, but one underlying theme of their failure is that they didn’t put enough time into the material. The word “time” has many different meanings. You didn’t have actual time because you were working at a another job, a family member is gravely ill (this actually happens a lot – I have personally known 2 or 3 students in just this year, whose parent was ill and/or died).

Time also concerns how you work. You’d be surprised how much time you actually waste, talking to friends, not concentrating on the words in your outline, flipping through your books, etc. You have to work smart.

Work Smart

First you need to structure your day. As a student, you just go from class to class, do studying whenever you can find an hour or two. As a graduate studying for the bar, you must make your study time count and work like it’s your first job and you want to impress your managing partner. I guarantee you, once you pass the bar and begin working, putting in 60-80 hours a week will be normal – so you might as well start working like a demon now.

How do you structure your day?

Work the Actual Bar Schedule

Wake up early enough to eat breakfast, read your e-mail, look at the news or exercise, look over today bar review topic with plenty of time to get to your bar review course. I know that some people will take the later sessions of bar review or are not morning people. But you must start working the bar schedule as soon as you can. You need to start mimicking the bar so on July 28th, you are ready to start the bar at 9:00 am, work 3 hours of the morning session, take an hour break and work 3 more hours of the bar. You want your body clock to be on bar exam time.

In order to work the bar schedule, you need to start preparing yourself for early mornings so you are ready to be an your optimal best on July 28th bar start time and you need to get into the habit of working at least 4 hour stretches with no interruption so you can sit easily for the 3 hour stretch of the actual bar.

Towards July, figure out how long it will take you to get up, get yourself ready for
the bar, eat something, drive time to the bar location, wait time to get into the bar location, and check-in time at the bar location, so you’ll in your sit at the 9:00 am start time. Starting about the first week of July start getting yourself out of bed at that time so your body will be acclimated to the wake up time. You do not want to be sleepy or fuzzy because you didn’t train your body to get up at a time you are not used to.

Also, many of us are just not breakfast eaters. But you know that you cannot go 3 hours without eating when you are taking the bar. Practice eating something prior to the bar, as you will need need the fuel and the energy for the bar. Start small, like an egg or a banana or toast – something to put in your body for the bar.

Since you will be doing more than 6 hours of studying per day to get ready, here’s how you should structure your day.

9:00 am – 1:00 pm: Go to Bar Review, or to your designated location and work a 4 hour stretch. The reason I recommend 4 hours is the reason why a sprinter runs more than the 100 yard dash. If you study in 4 hour stretches, the 3 hour bar sessions are going to make it easier for you to concentrate and put out your optimal best for the 3 hours required.

1:00 – 2:00 pm. Take your break – go exercise, eat, take a nap. Rest your mind.

2:00 pm – 6:00 pm. Another 4 hour stretch of uninterrupted study time.

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm. Take another break.

7:00 pm – 10:00 - 11:00 pm. Study for another 3 to 4 hours prior to going to bed.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to study.

Georgia’s Bar Examination Results by Law School for February 2009

Georgia has posted the bar exam results by percentage and by law school. There was a total of 380 takers, of which 215 takers passed, which is a 56.5% pass rate.

227 first time takers took the bar, of which 167 takers passed, which is a 73.5% pass rate.

153 repeaters took the bar, of which 48 takers passed, which is a 31.3% pass rate.

By Georgia law schools, here are the results:

School................ All Takers............First Time Takers..........AVE. MBE

....................#Took/#Pass/%Pass.......#Took/#Pass/%Pass

Mercer Law School.....6 of 3 = 50%............0 of 0 = 0%...........134.6

Emory University.....12 of 8 = 66.6%..........6 of 3 = 50%..........131.7

Univ. of Georgia.....10 of 7 = 70%............5 of 4 = 80%............137.9

Georgia State .......31 of 25 = 80.6%.........25 of 22 = 88%........145.7

John Marshall........27 of 14 = 51.8%..........9 of 7 = 77.7%.......131.5

TOTALS...............86 of 57 = 66.2%.........45 of 36 = 80%........137.6

It is interesting that some schools have such low February first time takers. I wonder if the schools actively discourage either December graduates or, even, February takers.

Michigan Bar Results by Law School for February 2009

I found the Michigan Bar Results by law school for February 2009 for both the overall rate and the first time rate. Here are the schools and their pass rates:

Overall Bar Pass Rate:

School.........Passing.......Taking........Pass Rate

Michigan.........8...............8.............100%

Cooley..........160..............212...........75%

Wayne State......33..............47............70%

Michigan State...36..............55............65%

Detroit-Mercy....37..............59............63%

Ave Maria........5...............10............50%


Total..........327............463............71%



First-Time Bar Pass Rate:

School.........Passing.....Taking........Pass Rate

Michigan...........6............6.............100%

Ave Maria..........1............1.............100%

Detroit-Mercy......19...........21............90%

Cooley.............136..........159.............86%

Wayne State........18...........23............78%

Michigan State.....22...........29............76%


Total..............245..........289...........85%



I will be curious to see how Ave Maria will do on future bar exams as they will be in a new jurisdiction in Naples, Florida starting in the fall. Florida is traditionally one of the harder bars in the nation.