MBE: The Great Equalizer

I loved the MBE, and not entirely due to some undiagnosed mental illness. I taught LSAT classes in law school and learned to appreciate multiple choice questions. The bar is obviously very different from the LSAT, but the one thing they have in common is that the more practice questions you do, the more likely you are to pass the exam. Don't get me wrong, I walked out of that day of the bar thinking I had maybe, maybe, chosen two right answers IF I was lucky and my strategy of lightly marking all four boxes worked for me (please, please, please know I'm kidding about that).
By some miracle I got more than two right and ended up passing, and here's my theory on that: the MBE is the great equalizer. On the essays you're judged not only on route memorization, but also on how well you write and organize. On the MBE no one has an advantage unless they have some special bubble checking skill. It's sheer memorization, not only of the "law" on which it's supposedly testing you, but also on how to answer MBE questions. Fortunately both the "law" and the ability to answer the questions can be picked-up by doing a zillion practice questions and, most importantly, carefully checking the answers. One of the most common mistakes I saw in my LSAT students was that they would correct their practice tests only caring about their score, and not about why they missed certain questions and got others right. This makes perfect sense since a practice test can take hours and calculating your score provides instant gratification, while figuring out why you got the score takes much, much longer. In the long run though, the why and how will be much more important than the score itself.

Twice the Fun?

So I'm doing it again and I simply cannot believe it.

Last summer, I blindly maneuvered my way through the Washington State Bar Exam. With nearly all of the other graduates of my 2007 law school class, I sat through ridiculously long lectures courtesy of Bar-Bri, painstakingly perfected my checklists (see link for study resources on the side of this blog ), and wrote about 612 essays (Washington is an all essay bar exam) to prepare for the two-and-a-half-days that I can only describe as the worst experience of my life: the bar exam.

To my great dismay and delight, I passed. BUT, I'm doing it again.

That's right, for the second time, I'm subjecting myself to those same Bar-Bri lectures, maniacally completing those checklists, and taking countless practice exams under "timed testing conditions." WHY, you ask? How could I possibly CHOOSE to make this decision again?

Well, I really didn't have much of a choice. I moved. To California. Where there is no reciprocity.

So here I am again. Preparing for a test that I thought I failed last summer but didn't. Making my mind go to work in ways I completely forgot it could. Trying to remember that at common law, burglary only occurred at night. Downing way too much red bull. Consuming copious amounts of sugar. And sporadically (sometimes hysterically) crying over a mortgage. (Not mine... the one on Blackacre).

I'm in the fortunate position of having passed a bar exam, but the unfortunate position of not knowing if I can be lucky enough to pass it twice. In the meantime, hand me a twinkie and a grande latte, because luck isn't going to get me everywhere and I've got some serious work to do.