Michigan Bar Exam Essay Tips – Last-Minute Tips to Improve your Bar Exam Score

Think you can’t improve your essay exam score the day before the exam? Think again. Here are three useful last-minute Michigan bar exam essay tips that will help you improve your bar exam score. I estimate that these Michigan bar exam essay tips helped me to improve my score by at least five points on the February 2011 Michigan bar exam. Note that this is not a detailed post about how to write essay exam answers. These are merely some last-minute tips that you should keep in mind when you take the essay portion of the Michigan bar exam.  

• • • • • • • Tip No. 1:  As you write your essay answers, be sure to underline and bold the “buzz words.” As a former essay grader for a bar review course, I can say firsthand that it is much easier to give points to students who draw attention to key words. When key words are bolded or underlined, I don’t have to spend ten minutes trying to figure out what the student is talking about and I can simply write check marks all over the page, give points, then move on.  For the same reason, it helps to break up your essay answer into short paragraphs rather than writing one long paragraph.  Make it as easy as possible for the essay grader to see that you know what you are talking about and give you points.

• • • • • • • Tip No. 2: Write long essay answers. This gives the grader an opportunity to give you more points.  Of course, you do not want to write answers that are so long that you either (a) run out of time, or (b) look unfocused. However, the fact is, graders cannot give you points for something that is not there.  Some graders, believe it or not, actually hate to give out 0’s, 1’s, and 2’s and they will look for ways to give more points. But if your essay is a quarter of a page and you don’t explain yourself or your analysis, even these graders won’t feel bad giving you a very low score. Thus, even if you do not know exactly what you are talking about, explain your answer and analysis. You might get an extra point or two for your analysis even if it is not spot-on.  You will certainly get more points than if you hardly say anything at all. (And, worst-case scenario, you will preserve some issues for appeal).

• • • • • • Tip No. 3: When you are done writing your answer, look back to the fact pattern to see if you forgot to analyze any important facts. Basically, after you have read the facts, written your answer, and are about to flip the page…briefly glance through the facts again. Is there anything in the fact pattern that you did not address? Is there any key fact that simply slipped your mind? Address it now. Talk about the key fact now. You will be surprised at how often you spot something extremely important on your second glance through the question. If you plan to implement this very important tip, make sure to leave a couple minutes at the end of each essay to do so.

As I mentioned above, I estimate that I gained at least five additional points because of these three strategies when I took the bar exam in February 2011. If you are looking for more Michigan bar exam essay tips, please see other Michigan bar exam blog posts.

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