|
|
|
Content of the Bar Exam
So what is it like to take the bar exam? Well, let's break it down by category.
Preparation time. The earlier the better is my philosophy. While I was preparing for the bar exam,
I was regularly telling people that it was the largest single academic effort that I had ever faced -- and I was saying
that after 3 years of Yale Law School and 4 years as an undergraduate at Stanford. Most prep courses will try to make you study maybe 8 hours
a day for two months prior to the exam. I know some people who have been able to prepare adequately for the same number
of days, but for only 3-5 hours a day. My personal opinion is that you can study much more efficiently for the exam than many
prep courses recommend, but I'll get to that later.
Structure. The exams differ state by state, but are roughly similar. Typically, the exam is broken into two or three
days. One day is always devoted to multiple choice questions, and the other days are usually devoted to just essays, and sometimes
some smaller multiple choice questions. The California exam, for example, is broken up as follows:
- Multi-state Multiple Choice -- all on one day, 2 sessions of three hours each
- General Essays -- split over two days, 2 sessions of three hours each
- Performance Test Essays -- split over two days, 2 sessions of three hours each
What's that like in reality? Basically, a lot of people wake up bright and early and march down to the test center by 9 a.m. You enter
a cavernous room that houses a thousand people or so, get your exam in front of you, and face dead silence and a blizzard of questions for
three hours. You are then released for an hour lunch, and then you're back again for another intense three hours, after which you crawl back,
exhausted, to wherever you came from to prepare for the next day. Doing that for two, even three days straight can be a real strain. That's why
it's important to imitate test conditions in your preparations, and to toughen up your endurance. A lot of times it comes down less to how much
knowledge you have, and more to how long you can endure the menacing scribble of pencils and a mind-numbing barrage of questions, under time pressure,
for six hours a day.
Type of Questions. There are three types of questions: performance, multi-state, and essay. Various states may also have hybrids of these --
for example, little essays or little sets of multiple choice questions addressing specific topics. There are two types of topics that each type of
question can address -- multi-state or state-specific. Multi-state questions test the subject matter that every bar exam test taker
across the entire country has to study. Every exam in the country will, for example, give you two sessions of three hours each of multi-state multiple
choice questions. The multi-state subject areas are:
- Contracts
- Torts
- Constitutional Law
- Sales (an affiliate of Contracts)
- Criminal Law
- Criminal Procedure
- Evidence
- Real Property
That's kind of nice, in that one third to one half of every exam in the country is basically the same, based on the same material and in the same
format. In California, the proportion was roughly one half -- the actual proportion is probably different from year to year -- because
2 of the 6 sessions were entirely devoted to multi-state questions, and 2 of the six sessions were devoted to General Essays (see above) that
could be on either multi-state or state-specific topics. Put another way, in California, since the last two sessions -- the Performance test -- were
not based on knowledge of either multi-state or state-specific law, you could just have multi-state knowledge in your head and still be fully prepared
for five sixths of the exam. It's a nice uniformity across the nation that can prove helpful if, for example, you need to take the bar exam for more than one
state. It also greatly simplifies your studying efforts, and helps you focus if you are running out of preparation time.
State-specific questions, on the other hand, test the law that, as the title implies, are specific to your state. This subject matter,
naturally, differs often -- but not always -- from state to state. Below I've listed the state-specific subjects for the California bar exam. Many
of those subjects, though with different content, are what appear on other bar exams as well:
- Civil Procedure
- Professional Responsibility
- Remedies
- Trusts
- Wills
- Community Property
- Corporate Law
Lastly, there's the Performance exams which only some states, like California, administer. The nice thing about Performance exam questions is that you don't need any
knowledge of any substantive law to get a perfect score. All of the law that is required -- usually it's made up law -- is provided in the materials
of the exam. What these exams test is how well you can deal with a mixture of facts, case law (i.e. court opinions), and statutes to come up with a legal
solution to a fake legal problem. If you have some sense of how case law, statutes, and facts interact with one another -- one of the basic tenets of
legal education in law school -- then these sections will be a cake walk. For sure, you'll want to familiarize yourself with sample questions and
maybe take a practice exam, but if you feel good on one fake one, you probably will do fine on the actual exam. I literally did one practice exam for 2 hours
and that was the total extent of my preparation for this part of the test. My advice: definitely prepare for it a little, but otherwise devote your
attention to the other sections. I'll get more into suggested tactics for the exam later.
So that's it for the different types of law to study. It looks kind of long and intimidating, doesn't it? I remember when I saw long lists of
subjects as I provided above, my stomach churned and I thought, oh man, this is why people curse this test and why preparation is such a painful
experience. It doesn't have to quite be that way, though.
Next -- Things to Do Before the Exam
|
|
|
|
