Dr. Carolyn Nygren
You will find your bar exam course a very intensive experience. Most
people will benefit from doing some preparation before the course
starts. If you are still in law school, take advantage of any video tape
review sessions your bar review course offers during your final
semester. If you can get your books then, you might want to take them to
the tape sessions to underline sentences in the book that might be good
rule statements for the outlines you prepare later. However, you will
benefit just from listening to the tapes and getting back into thinking
about the subject matter.
Your bar review course will probably cover the multiple choice
questions of the multi-state portions of the bar exam at the beginning
of the course when you review substance. Your instructor may give you
hints on how to take multiple choice exams and suggest that the best way
to do well is to do as many questions as you can. Usually you will be
given a large number of questions to test yourself after you have
finished learning each substantive area of the law.
Only after the training in multiple choice questions finishes will
you start thinking about essays. Then you will review issue spotting and
answer formats and be given fact patterns so that you can test your
essay writing skills.
I believe this approach means that you miss the reality that both
multiple choice and essay questions require the same skills of issue
spotting, knowing the rules, identifying the relevant facts and
analysis. I have found that I do better on multiple choice questions if
I first treat them as essay questions. I read the fact pattern, read the
call of the questions without reading the choices, then I do the
analysis of the question as if I were going to write the answer as an
essay. Only after I have come to some conclusion about the analysis do I
read the four answer choices. Then when I read the choices, the best
answer often jumps out at me. Now I would be less than honest if I said
this happened all the time. It doesn't. Some multiple choice questions
will forever stump you. However, you have to keep in mind that you need
not get them all right.
In both parts of your bar review course the emphasis probably will be
on testing yourself as you learn. However, since it has been a long time
since you have had your first year subjects, I believe it is important
that a good portion of your preparation time should be devoted to
training yourself. This means that you should know what law is involved
before you try to answer a question. If you know that a question is
about mutual assent then you can devote your energies to practicing the
test taking skills.
Before your bar review course starts you can train yourself. You will
need a book with multiple choice questions used in past bar exams in
which the questions are indexed by topic. You should know a rule for the
topic you are going to work on and the elements of the rule. However,
you need know no detail or nuance. You can train yourself by doing the
following:
- Identify all the questions about one topic.
- Read each question looking only at the call of the question.
- Write the rule with the elements on a piece of scratch paper and
write the words in the fact pattern that relate to each element
beside it.
- Come to a preliminary analysis of the fact pattern by determining
which elements are clearly satisfied in the fact pattern and which
element (if any) is at issue.
- Now read the four choices and see if your analysis leads you to
one choice. Then read the explanation in the book for the correct
answer.
- Continue until you have finished all the questions about the
topic. You can use the explanations to flesh out your rule
statements and elements into an outline.
- Treat each question as if it were an essay question, and write out
an answer.
Do not do all questions in one section first and then look at all the
answers. You will lose the opportunity for learning. When you have
finished all the questions you should be starting to develop a
"feel" for what fact patterns in that area of the law look
like and which words in fact patterns provide important clues to
answers.
This is a technique I use in seminars for third year students each
year. Usually I try to do one seminar early in spring semester so that
students can begin then to plan their study strategy. For many students
this seminar is quite a wake-up call. They have taken few issue spotter
exams since first year. Some have chosen to participate in internships
or clinical programs, and others have taken seminar courses for which
they wrote papers. Their skills in analyzing fact patterns and writing
essays under timed conditions have been lost. In response to student
concern, I have often organized regular practice sessions throughout the
spring semester. These students start their bar review course way ahead.
You can too.
