Three Reasons You Need MBE Practice Questions

Studying for the bar exam is a big endeavor. The bar exam has multiple parts and covers many subjects. You may feel tempted to just focus on studying legal concepts through lectures, outlines, and flashcards. You may also find yourself just practicing the essay questions. While these are good steps to take, it’s also important to practice questions for the Multistate Bar Exam, or MBE. The MBE is composed of 200 multiple-choice questions. You will have six hours to take the entire test; three hours in the morning for 100 questions and three hours in the afternoon for another 100 questions. The MBE is a completely different beast from your law school exams and the LSAT. In this post, we’ll discuss three reasons why you need to MBE practice questions for the bar exam.

Three Reasons You Need MBE Practice Questions

1. Get accustomed to the multiple-choice exam format.

Law schools focus heavily on essay exams and papers, with few multiple-choice questions. By the time you finished law school, you probably got used to the “spot the issue” style of essay exams. While those skills will serve you well for the essay portion of the bar exam, you need to get your mind prepared to take on the multiple-choice format of the MBE. Taking multiple-choice questions is a skill. You need to learn strategies like how to eliminate certain choices, make educated guesses, and skip questions that are taking too long.

2. Practice applying legal concepts to short fact patterns.

The bar exam isn’t a test on how well you can recite legal concepts, but instead tests how well you can apply legal concepts to concrete questions and short fact patterns. Unlike law school exams, you will not have a lengthy narrative to read and multiple facts to keep straight before answering the question. Each MBE question will have just a couple of sentences with the relevant facts. You need to practice reading the fact pattern, quickly discerning what area of law the question is testing, and getting to the right answer. This is a skill that takes time and practice to develop.

3. Help hone your time management.

Practicing MBE questions will help you with your time management skills for the bar exam. Remember: every single question on the MBE is worth the same number of points. A question that you answer quickly and confidently is worth the same as a question that takes you several agonizing minutes. You need to maintain good momentum on the MBE and not allow tricky questions to bog you down. If you’re concerned about managing your time well for the bar exam, make sure to read our blog post on time management!

Prepare with official released MBE questions

You can find multiple sources of simulated MBE questions, which are written by test prep companies. But your best bet is to practice with official released MBE questions written by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. JD Advising has a wealth of official released MBE questions in our MBE QBank. Check it out!

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Three Reasons You Need MBE Practice Questions