How Much MPT Practice Do I Need To Complete?
How Much MPT Practice Do I Need To Complete?
The MPT is often overlooked and discounted as “easy” because it is a “closed universe.” Students know they receive the cases and laws so there is nothing they need to memorize prior to taking this portion of the exam. Unfortunately, this mindset causes many students to skip studying for the MPT, losing out on crucial points. The best aspect of the MPT is that students who practice can drastically increase their scores for the section, thus the overall exam.
Follow these four tips to determine how much MPT practice you need!
How Much MPT Practice Do I Need To Complete?
1. Review the MPT frequency chart to see which MPTs are most common
Students should take a few minutes to review our MPT frequency chart. This can guide students and help them determine which MPTs should receive the most attention during practice. The best method is to review the format for each type of task because students often lose valuable points for incorrectly organizing the answer based on the prompt. Once students understand the overall formats, they should start looking specifically at the formats of questions most commonly asked, the persuasive brief and objective memo.
2. Practice MPTs based on the percentage of points the MPT represents for the overall test
In UBE districts, the MPT is worth 20% of the entire exam score. While this number is obviously less than the other portions of the exam, it still represents a valuable opportunity to pick up the necessary number of points needed to pass. We do NOT recommend students spend an equal amount of time on each portion of the bar. Since the bar represents 20% of the overall score, students should spend about 20% of their time preparing for the MPT. If students are studying five days a week, spend one day on the MPT. This eventually comes out to about 15-20 MPTs over the course of the study period.
3. Prioritize the common MPT formats when studying
The bulk of your MPT practice should be studying the most likely formats that will be asked by the bar examiners. These are the objective memos, opinion, and demand letters. We recommend spending the most time one these three. It is very likely you will receive two of these and almost certain you will receive at least one. It is also not unheard of for the examiners to ask for the same type of format twice such as two opinion letters. Knowing all three of these formats well and practicing your timing on these three formats will certainly improve your MPT score. For students that do 20 MPTs for the summer, and least half should be based on these three formats.
4. Review each of the unusual tasks at least once.
Occasionally, examiners may ask students to perform a unique task. These include drafting closing argument, a contract provision, a bench memo, and complaints. While it is extremely unlikely students will receive more than one odd task, students should be prepared for any of these formats. Exclusively studying the three common formats discussed above may be the statistically best option, but nothing kills confidence more than seeing an MPT question and feeling unprepared to address it. Students should practice each unique task once, just to understand how to draft the responses. This way, if your examiners decide to throw you a curveball with a unique task, you are prepared and can collect as many points as possible.
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