Three Common MBE Mistakes to Avoid

Three Common MBE Mistakes to Avoid

In this post, we discuss three common MBE mistakes to avoid. These are MBE mistakes we see students make frequently. And by figuring out what they are at the beginning of your bar exam preparation, hopefully you can avoid them!

Three Common MBE Mistakes to Avoid

MBE mistake #1: Not using real MBE questions.

“Real” MBE questions are those that are released by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE). The NCBE is the organization that writes the bar exam.  You cannot get better questions than the real questions as these will prepare you for the style and format of the bar exam.  You can also see some of the issues that the NCBE likes to test.

Unfortunately, many popular commercial courses do not provide real questions as a regular part of their bar exam preparation and instead have students focus on questions that the course has invented. While these are not always “bad” questions they are not the best questions either!

Check out this post if you are wondering where to find real MBE questions.

MBE mistake #2: Not focusing on the highly tested areas of law.

Some students spend an entire weekend on the rule against perpetuities (RAP), and only a half-day on negligence. This doesn’t make sense if you think about what the highly tested areas of MBE law are.

RAP will likely be tested in one MBE question on the actual exam. (If you are taking a commercial course, you may see a million questions on it — remember this is one of the disadvantages of using course-invented questions as they do not mimic the actual issues tested on the bar exam.)

RAP is one question whereas negligence is 12-13 questions. It makes a lot more sense to focus on negligence when you are studying as you will earn a lot more potential points on the MBE for the time you put in. Check out this post to see the highly tested areas of MBE law.

MBE mistake #3: Not making memorization a priority.

This MBE mistake is so common. Students go to lecture and immediately after lecture they start answering MBE questions. If you do that, you will likely not be getting very many questions right and you will stress yourself out.

Instead, make sure you learn how to memorize your bar exam outlines. Then, dedicate a significant amount of time after lecture to memorize your outlines before diving into practice questions. This way, you will find that you start to get those nuanced questions right. And you will start to improve over time.

We hope you found this post helpful! To read our top ten MBE tips, check out this post.

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