Five Uniform Bar Exam Myths

Five Uniform Bar Exam Myths

If you are taking the Uniform Bar Exam, you may be curious to know some of the Uniform Bar Exam myths floating around! In this post, we detail five Uniform Bar Exam myths that many students accept as fact.  

Five Uniform Bar Exam Myths

1. The multistate performance test (MPT) portion is “easy.”

It is so unbelievably common to ignore the MPT portion of the bar exam! The MPT is worth 20% of your score in a Uniform Bar Exam state, which means you need to take it very seriously and practice MPTs regularly. We frequently hear of students who do not even practice one MPT before the bar exam. In reality, you should be practicing several MPTs!

It is a portion of the bar exam where you can substantially increase your score through practicing! Make sure you incorporate time to practice MPTs each and every week of your bar exam study!

2. I need to practice thousands of multistate bar exam (MBE) questions to pass the MBE. 

This is another Uniform Bar Exam myth! While you certainly want to regularly practice MBE questions so that you get exposed to the material, it is much more important to practice them well. In other words, quality beats quantity!

Check out this post on how on MBE tips and how to improve your MBE score by using a high-quality approach to questions. Don’t fall into the 100-question-a-day MBE trap!

3. If I skim essays each week and write one or two, I will be prepared for the multistate essay exam (MEE).

While many students do not specifically say this to themselves, this is the approach they take. They will occasionally look at an essay and skim through it. They will often times just “think” about what they would have written without actually writing an answer.

This is in part because most students worry about the MBE and tend to focus on it. And it is in part because many commercial courses only grade 2 or so essays. If you want to excel on the MEE portion, make sure to write essays every single week! And you should be writing 4-5 a week!

4. I shouldn’t really start to “memorize” my outlines until the last two weeks of bar prep. 

This is a popular Uniform Bar Exam myth, in part because bar exam courses tell students this! Many students go to lecture and then dive into MBE questions. These students save all of their memorization to the end.  The problem with this approach is that these students do not have the nuances of the law memorized. The bar exam does not test “general concepts” of the law. Instead, it tests nuances and details!

Oftentimes a student will go to lecture, complete, say, 100 MBE questions, get stressed out, complete more questions (but not see any score improvement) and go through this vicious cycle where they work hard but do not see any improvement. It is because they are missing this vital step of memorization!

Please make sure that after lecture you take plenty of time to memorize your bar exam outlines. Read this post on how to memorize your bar exam outlines. Memorization techniques are critical.

5. If I complete 100% of my commercial course, I will pass.

We wish this was true, but it is not. A lot of people complete their commercial courses and do not pass. Instead of making it your goal to complete your course, make it your goal to pass the bar exam.

This means:

• If your course does not assign enough essays, take it upon yourself to do more essays each week!
• If your course’s lectures do not help you, do not spend hours every day on them. Find a way to speed them up or omit them altogether.
• If your course does not give you enough MPT guidance, get tutoring or use online resources to make sure you are learning the MPT.
• Figure out how to best memorize your bar exam outlines using the link above and do it every day!

These are just some examples. The point is you should not be afraid to break away from your commercial course if it means you are improving your chances of passing the bar exam!

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