Short post today because my wrists hurt. I might have to invest in some speech recognition software. Useless Dicta has some great bar exam studying advice she received from friends who had passed the bar. All of it is great stuff, but let’s pick one in particular:
(4) Just because all of your friends, study buddies, etc., are making thousands of flash cards for every bar subject doesn’t mean you have to do that too. If flash cards have never worked for you before don’t try to make them work for you now. Flash cards are not the key to passing the bar. You’ve spent many years up to this point discovering what study methods work and don’t work, so don’t try something totally new just because you feel like you have to be doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing to study for the bar.
Absolutely fantastic advice. There’s a push that begins when you enter law school and continues through the bar prep period where you’re constantly told that you need to throw out everything you’ve learned about how best to study and start over again because “law school is different than undergrad” or “the bar exam is different than law school.”
Generally, a test is a test is a test. Yes, you will have slightly different study habits for a law school exam vs. the LSAT vs. the bar exam; not to mention different habits for a multiple choice Civ Pro exam vs. an issue-spotting Property exam. But you know basic things that work for you. By the time you get to the bar exam, you should have a pretty good handle on whether flash cards or outlines or mind maps, etc. are useful to you. I don’t have numbers on this, but I’m willing to bet that more bar failures are the result of people throwing the baby out with the bath water than people who should have changed study habits that weren’t going to work on the bar.
As long as your preferred study habit is not “wait until the week before and cram like hell,” you should tweak and test rather than rebuild from scratch. Be sure to pop over to Useless Dicta for the rest of the advice on days off, grading scales, and exam anxiety.
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That IS great advice, I’ll remember that this winter when I’m deep in study. I kind of wonder why everyone tries to scare us by telling us the bar isn’t like a lawschool exam. Seriously, if you can survive lawschool you can survive the bar right (or any other mental/intelllectual challenge for that matter!)?
Absolutely. I know it doesn’t describe every law student, but there are lots of people who had 4.0s in college, 175+ LSATs, got through Harvard or Yale Law, and fail the bar because they thought they needed to change everything. You’re a good student! You’ve proven you’re a good student? Why change without evidence to the contrary?