UBE Time Management Tips

UBE Time Management Tips

Are you preparing for the Uniform Bar Exam and wondering how you will have time to possibly learn everything you need to know for the exam?  You are not alone!  In this post, we provide tips for UBE time management.

UBE Time Management Tips

Make a study schedule.

If you are taking a commercial course, the company generally provides a syllabus or study schedule.  This is a great starting point, but you do not have to stick to it!  Feel free to make adjustments tailored to your particular situation.  For instance, maybe you took (and aced!) Family Law in law school, but don’t even know what Secured Transactions is.  You may want to decrease the recommended amount of time spent studying Family Law and increase the amount of time spent studying Secured Transactions.  Or maybe you have a personal conflict at some point during bar preparation and it is necessary to re-arrange the schedule to accommodate the conflict.  That’s ok!

Try to be realistic as you create your study schedule.  It is simply not feasible to study for 12+ hours a day, seven days a week.  It is absolutely necessary to take breaks and to schedule time for personal activities, such as exercise.

The important thing is that you have a realistic study schedule and you make a serious effort to stick to it.  That will allow you to most efficiently spend your time leading up to the bar exam.  For more details on how to put together a personal study schedule, check out our guide on How to Make a Uniform Bar Exam Study Schedule.

Create a distraction-free study space.

If you have a fantastic study schedule but find that every time you sit down to study, you are distracted by something or someone that is keeping you from studying, your fantastic schedule is basically worthless.  Hopefully, during law school, you were able to figure out where and how you were able to be most productive.  Maybe you get more work done at home than you do at the library. Many people find studying at the library distracting because they run into law school friends.  Or maybe you need to leave the house because you are too distracted by books, television, housework, etc. when you stay home.  Figure out what works best for you and utilize that!  With the limited amount of time you have to study, you want to make every minute count, and working in a distraction-free environment will optimize your productivity! 

Focus on the highly-tested material.

There is simply too much material to try to learn every single law that could possibly be tested.  You will study much more efficiently if you focus on the highly tested material.

The NCBE has released the frequency with which each topic is tested on the MBE portion of the exam.  You can review the Highly Tested Topics on the MBE for each subject here.  If you look at Torts, for example, Negligence will be the topic on 50% of the 25 Torts questions that appear on the MBE.  That means you will see 12-13 questions on Negligence!  By comparison, you will only see “other torts” (such as defamation) on 3-5 questions.  That means that you want to know Negligence REALLY well.  Although you should never ignore any subject altogether, you can spend less time studying defamation knowing that it will not show up as frequently on the exam.

Although the NCBE has not officially released the highly tested topics on the MEE portion of the exam, JD Advising has compiled a list of the topics that have appeared more frequently over the years, as well as how those topics have been tested, in the Highly Tested MEE Topics Guide.  In this Guide, we provide tips and tricks for each subject on the MEE, as well as a breakdown of some of the more common topics within each subject.

Seek additional help early.

If you fall behind on your study schedule, there is generally not much time to catch up.  If you find that you are having difficulty understanding a particular subject, instead of putting it off for later (and you will probably not find any time later to come back to it), seek help early.  Reach out to classmates who might be able to explain it to you or find a tutor!  JD Advising offers tutoring services for the UBE on all MBE and MEE subjects.  Our tutors have helped hundreds of students pass the UBE and have tips and tricks they can teach you early on so that you don’t continue to fall further and further behind as the bar exam approaches.

• Looking to Pass the Bar Exam?

  Free or discounted resources

  • A five-star UBE course (for as low as $1399.99!) that provides you with the best instruction, outlines, and questions. Preview our course for free here!
  • Our new Free Bar Exam Resource Center, which includes our most popular free guides, posts, webinars, and more!
  • Free popular bar exam guides (on the MBE, MEE, how to pass the bar exam, and what to do if you failed the bar exam) written by bar exam experts!
  • A free Early Bar Prep Course for law students
  • Free bar exam webinars taught by top bar exam experts

  
  Other resources

  Our most POPULAR and highly rated bar exam resources are:

  • Our On Demand and Premium Bar Exam Courses
  • Bar Exam Private Tutoring by bar exam experts
  • MBE One-Sheets and MEE One-Sheets, CA One-Sheets—rated five stars! Our customers love these supplements!
  • Real MBE questions—the best practice questions available!
  • NEW! Mastery Classes for the MBE, MEE, and CA bar exams (these are effective and engaging classes to review the highly tested areas of law!)

  We also have several additional MBE, MEE, and MPT products available.