Four Tips For Success On Michigan Bar Exam Essays

Four Tips For Success On Michigan Bar Exam Essays

The Michigan Board of Law Examiners announced that the July 2020 Michigan bar exam will consist exclusively of essays. Therefore, if you’re planning to take the Michigan bar exam in July, your ability to write well-organized, concise, and responsive essays is the sole determinant of whether you pass or fail the bar exam. Whether you are new to Michigan bar exam essays and need some guidance or have consistently struggled with this portion of the Michigan bar exam, this set of 4 Tips for Essay Exam Success is for you!

Four Tips For Success On Michigan Bar Exam Essays

Michigan Bar Exam Essays Tip #1: Memorize the Law Well

Much of your score on a Michigan bar exam essay rests upon you properly reciting the correct legal rule. To do this, you need to have fully memorized the rule statements provided in your bar exam course outlines. “Fully memorized” does not mean that you recall only the “gist” of the rule or “something close” to the rule. Instead, it means you have committed the proper words to memory.

Many students struggle initially with how to properly memorize the law for the Michigan bar exam. Some think that memorization simply requires reading the outline and saying the rules out loud a few times. Such students perform poorly on essays because they permit themselves to get away with poorly worded imitations of the actual rule. The difference between a passing and failing essay response on the Michigan bar exam often comes down to how precisely you define the contours of the interest or right at issue.

Example:

Consider a Real Property Michigan bar exam essay that asks whether A has a valid easement over B’s land. As part of your response, you must type the definition of an “easement.” A proper recitation of the definition (the one that will get you full points) goes as follows:

            An easement is a non-possessory interest that gives one a right to use the land of another.

A student who takes a casual approach to memorization might recite “something close” to the right definition, like this:

            An easement gives you the right to enter and to legally use someone else’s property.

Sounds “close enough,” right? Unfortunately, the examiners will disagree. This student’s vague imitation of the rule failed to include that an easement is only a non-possessory interest in land. These two words could mean the difference between a passing and failing essay score.

Proper memorization also helps you to save time on Michigan bar exam essays. Once you have memorized the law, you can quickly and accurately recall and write down the relevant rules.

Begin memorizing early, review the law often, and don’t cut corners. A top score on Michigan bar exam essays requires exact recitation of the relevant rules.

Michigan Bar Exam Essays Tip #2: Follow Proper IRAC Structure

As you practice Michigan bar exam essays, never lose sight of who it is that will eventually be reading and grading your essays. Many of the graders are practicing attorneys who wade through hundreds of essays each year for a bit of extra cash. High scoring Michigan bar exam essays are those that make the grader’s job easier—they are well organized and concise.

What is a “well-organized” bar exam essay? We lay this out fully in our book on how to pass the Michigan bar exam. In brief, you want to follow the same IRAC structure that got you through law school. Your “Issue” statement should be an underlined heading, followed by a proper statement of the relevant law. Once you have stated the law relevant to the issue, analyze the facts in the prompt according to the law.

And finally, do not forget your conclusion. Unlike law school essays, most Michigan bar exam essays ask you to decide an issue one way or the other. The fact patterns are designed so that there is a right and wrong answer!

Michigan Bar Exam Essays Tip #3: Write About What the Examiners Tell You to Write About

Once you have memorized the law properly and have learned proper essay structure, it’s time for you to sit down and practice Michigan bar exam essays.

Example:

Let’s say that you’ve selected a Contracts and Sales essay. After you carefully read the fact pattern, you arrive at the prompt—the question or questions that the examiners want you to answer:

Assume that a valid contract was created between X and Y. Is the contract enforceable? Explain.

At this point, your mind starts to go into overdrive. You have reams of rules spinning in your head, and you just want to start typing and get this over with. So, you type out a proper issue header, and then dive into the rules. You start with the definition of a contract. Then you define what an “offer” is, then “acceptance”, then “consideration.”You are now 2 or 3 minutes into your answer. You have successfully splattered the page with accurate recitations of the rules relevant to the creation of a valid contract.

But the Michigan bar examiners didn’t ask you to cover whether a contract was created. They told you to assume that a valid contract exists. The rules that you recited regarding contract formation are therefore wholly irrelevant and unresponsive to the prompt. Even if you eventually get around to typing the correct rules, you have made the grader’s job more difficult by forcing them to wade through a morass of irrelevant rules.

To avoid this, always pause both before you begin your essay response and after you complete it to ensure that your answer properly tracks the prompt. Before you begin typing, give yourself a moment to calmly recollect the relevant rules and mentally discard the rest. After you arrive at your conclusion, take one last look at the prompt to ensure you did not miss anything.

A well written Michigan bar exam essay is a responsive one!

Michigan Essay Tip #4: Carefully Review Past Michigan Bar Exam Essays to Figure Out What Areas are Likely to be Tested

This may seem obvious, and in July 2020 it is more important than ever. Michigan bar exam essays follow certain patterns. The examiners have a few “favorite” segments of each subject that are tested time and time again. For instance, Michigan Constitutional Law essays often test the 1^st Amendment but have rarely even touched upon executive powers. The more essays that you review, the better idea you will have of what the Michigan bar examiners are likely test and what they will likely leave out.

If you are looking for past Michigan bar exam essays, check out this list of resources.

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