So You Failed the Bar Exam...

So you failed the bar exam.

You are so not alone. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of emails I’ve gotten over the last year+ from people who also failed the bar exam. In Illinois and Texas and New York and Florida and Colorado and a whole bunch of other states.

This blog provided a lot of comfort and advice over those awful months of studying, and I’ve exchanged a bunch of emails with people

How I finally passed the Illinois Bar Exam.

A lot of you may have just come across this post while googling around and trying to figure out how to study for the bar exam, so you may not know my story. Feel free to go back and read for details, but a brief summary:

-       May 2010 – graduate law school.

-       Summer 2010 I took Barbri and attended the lectures in Chicago.

-       July 2010 took bar exam

-       October 1, 2010 – Results released. Failed. Cry for a couple hours. Move on. Sign up to take Barbri again.

-       January and February 2011 I re-studied for the Illinois bar exam using Barbri. I decided to skip the lectures (best decision ever), study my outlines from before (bad move/waste of time), and do more practice questions (good move! Do this!)

-       February 2011 – Took bar exam for second time.

-       April 1, 2011 – found out I failed again.  Spend a few days in mourning. Spend a few weeks trying to decide if I should take the Texas or Illinois bar exam in July. Decide on Texas. Spend a few weeks researching and realize I've missed the deadline to take the Texas bar. Back to re-taking Illinois.

-       May 2011 – order Micromash/Multistate Edge for MBE prep. Highly recommend.

-       June 2011 – start working with a tutor for essay prep. Quickly realize I want to use my tutor for MBE questions too.

-       July 2011 – Illinois bar exam, round three.

-       October 1, 2011.  – Sweet, sweet relief. Seriously – there is no other word to describe how I felt. Not happy. RELIEVED.

-       November 2011 – get sworn in and start at best job ever. LIFE IS GOOD.

I hated barbri, for a multitude of reasons. Namely:

-       It’s a one size fits all approach that doesn’t fit all. There is no tailoring it to how you study or how you learn. They give you a “paced” program to follow. The name “paced” is pretty funny because there is no pacing at all… it’s 100% lightning speed for 10 weeks. It’s overwhelming and unnecessary. And it leaves no room for adjustments. For example if you feel like you did what they said to do for the day to learn property but you don’t feel like you have a good grip on property, too bad. You’ve got to move on to the next thing because there is too much to learn to lag behind. And once you start lagging behind you NEVER. CATCH. UP.

-       I found it REALLY hard  to watch the lectures at home. I had to physically go to the lecture hall or else I’d pause it a gazillion times and a three hour lecture would take six hours. (I realize this is more of a personal problem than a barbri problem, just feel like listing it here)

-       In Chicago the lectures are in a super stupid out of the way location super far from my house. Pain in the ass to get to. Waste of two hours every day commuting two and from lectures.

-       When you go to barbri, it’s a bunch of really stressed out people in a room talking about how stressed out they are. Nothing annoys me more than that. Half the time I found myself sitting in lectures thinking about how I wanted to stab the girl in front of me with 18 highlighter colors and 45,000 tabbed pages in her outline book instead of paying attention to what the lecturer was saying. If you can concentrate and get through the lectures on your own I’d highly recommend doing that. The environment at the live lectures is not a fun one. Stressed people feed off of other stressed people and it sucks.

-       When you retake barbri they give ZERO guidance. Not kidding… ZERO. So I found myself in January 2010 trying to figure out what the hell to do. GO to the lectures again? Watch the lectures online? Watch all the lectures? Watch the ones on subjects I felt strongest in? Watch the ones I felt I needed the most help in? Do practice questions? Study the black letter law? Etc etc etc.

So what did I do differently the third time around?

I got a tutor. I HIGHLY recommend getting a tutor. I used John with Law Preps and have recommended him to a bunch of people. He knows his shit, put together a totally reasonable study schedule, and helped me out with actual exam material, exam anxiety, exam frustration/anger, etc. 

As for study schedule – I think this was huge for me. Barbri tries to have you do like 15,000 things per day. A typical day looks something like: Read an outline for one subject, then have a lecture on that subject, then review some other subject, then do some essays on a subject you studied two weeks ago and don’t remember, then feel really bad about yourself and stress out because you studied for 20 hours that day and can’t remember a single thing.

The schedule my tutor put together was about 1000 times more reasonable. I would spend three DAYS on a subject instead of three hours. More time for things to sink in, more time to master a subject.

Also it was extremely beneficial for me to have someone to orally go through essay answers with. Instead of being like “oh yeah I know the answer to that one” I had to actually tell him EXACTLY what I would have answered. As I discussed below – this helped me to get every buzzword the bar exam graders were looking for.

The third time around I spent significantly less time going through the lectures/outlines and spent the majority of time doing practice questions. I think if I had done this the first time around the outcome would have been different. I spent way too much time trying to learn and understand the subjects and not enough time trying to learn how to answer the questions. Which is totally stupid – you’d think that if the test was doing what it was supposed to do, which is test your understanding of the material, you’d want to understand the material. That was probably a big part of the reason I had such a problem with the test – I get so frustrated and mad at how stupid it is. Once I figured out how to spot the tricks and patterns in MBE questions, my scores went up a bunch. Unfortunately I didn’t figure that out until summer 2011 instead of summer 2010. Whoops.

My number one piece of advice would just be to do something DIFFERENT the next time around. I really think that if I had sucked it up and paid for a tutor instead of trying to re-do barbri on my own, I wouldn't have failed the second time. Obviously what I did the first time didn't work, so I'm not sure why I thought that just doing more of it the second time would be the differencemaker. It wasn't. I'm not saying that everyone should get a tutor (although it worked for me and worked for several other people I know), but I think you need to change your approach. Barbri is NOT the only option. It sucks to spend the money on a second test prep after you've already shelled out 3 grand for barbri, but it sucks way more to have a $150,000 law degree that you can't use. 

I got the following in an email from a reader and think she’s 100% spot on. She and her boyfriend both took the bar exam in July 2010, she passed, he failed. The he failed again. Then he finally passed on the third time. (Bless both of their hearts.)

“He also used flashcards each time around, and the biggest difference I noticed in his preparation for the third time was that when I quizzed him on the flashcards he was reciting the exact wording of the definitions rather than to explain the concept with examples. He's one of those people who has trouble with memorization and with the previous two tests and exams in law school he answered essays by using examples. But with the bar all they're looking for is regurgitation of definitions. Basically figuring out his weakness (essays) and focusing on how to improve it helped him improve across the board. If anyone can go look at their answers and what they got wrong then I think he would highly recommend it.”

I think that this was huge for me as well. In talking with my tutor I realized that I really DID know the answers to questions, I just wasn’t getting the words out right. I was explaining the concepts correctly, but I wasn’t using the buzzwords that bar exam graders use when they go through and grade essays.

Other thoughts from readers/friends that I thought were dead on:

“I didn’t tell anyone I was taking the bar again and after the test, I didn’t tell anyone I had taken it and was waiting on results. No one in my family knew (except my mom a couple days before the test). Not even my close girl friends from law school knew. [Law school friend] had no idea until after I told her I passed. I needed to take the pressure from well-meaning friends and family off.  I needed to eliminate the dumb “JFK took it 3478297489 times before he passed, you’ll be ok” comments away. My response to that line had gone from “hahaha (not really funny)” to “yeah, cool, but I’m not a Kennedy and this matters and it’s a little different” to “if you fucking say that to me one more time, I’ll cut you.”  So....I kept it a secret. And it helped.”

Obviously I talked about it a lot on the blog and on twitter and to close friends, but I can totally see why you’d not mention it at all. And OMG WITH THE JFK COMMENT. Word of advice – NEVER MENTION FUCKING JFK IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE TAKING THE BAR EXAM. ESPECIALLY NEVER MENTION JFK IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO FAILED THE BAR EXAM. PLEASE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. FORGET YOU KNOW THAT FUN FACT.

I also had several people tell me that they took some time off in between taking the test and chose not to take it back to back. It wasn’t something I really considered but I can totally understand why you’d want to take some time and regroup before tackling the monstrosity again. You have GOT to be in the right place mentally to study for this test.

Similar to what I said earlier about not taking Barbri again and making your own schedule

“I didn’t take bar/bri or PMBR again – I had all the books, in duplicate. I worked out a schedule that worked for me – not bar/bri’s ridiculous 37 hour day. Not PMBR’s idea of listening to Steve Palmer (who really looks like a troll) for hours on end. I knew where my weak area was – the MBE. I worked multiple choice questions. Then I reviewed my own outlines that I made the first time, so I didn’t have to deal with the bar/bri outlines. I outlined essays, in bluebooks.”

Radom test tips:

-       I made reservations for lunch with a non-bar exam-taking friend somewhere nice-ish every day. I was not about to listen to 800 bar exam takers at the Corner Bakery talking about what they answered for their essays. I HIGHLY recommend this. I would make the reservation for 12, have a friend who worked nearby get there at 11:45, order me a diet coke and whatever I wanted from the menu, and wait for me. If I needed to jet before the bill came, they stayed and waited. I also instructed them that they were not to bring up the bar exam under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

-       I know some people who took other states said that they brought their lunches and ate in their car. I think this is a good idea too. Just go somewhere to get away from the other idiots taking the test.

-       I didn’t stay at a hotel. I don’t know anyone that did. This probably only applies to Chicago people, since I guess some of you don’t have a choice.

-       One of the best things that I did was study at a law library that was not the law school I went to. There are 6 law schools in Chicago so tons of options for places to study. School I didn’t go to = no one I know there = no one to walk over to me and freak out about questions or studying to me. Peaceful studying. I can’t concentrate at Starbucks. It works for some people, but definitely not me. Too much going on.

This is all I can think of for now… I’m sure there’s more I can update later. Hope this helps someone. And if not – sorry you had to read all of it! Please email me with questions, as always. I’m happy to help anyone dealing with this miserable process.