Your friend runs an online business doing product reviews of various types of equipment such as weed sprayers, fire fighting pumps, and Davey pumps. He’s given you a place to stay. The deal was that you can stay for as long as you need to, or until you finish your law degree, but you have to help out manage the contents of his eCommerce portal, particularly making sure that the legal language used is correct.
Since you also majored in marketing, you help out in that aspect as well, ensuring the website gets the relevant hits and that it’s properly optimized. You’ve been able to focus on helping him out for the past two months, and that help has positively impacted the business. You just drafted another memorandum of agreement with a new partner service provider. But you’d asked permission if you could withdraw a little bit from your semi-official responsibilities as the BAR exam is coming up soon. You still have not wrapped your head around the idea of taking the exam. Your vacillating whether to take it this year or the next. No. It has to be this year. But what do you need to do to prepare adequately?
The following discussion might give you some ideas.
An Overview of Bar Exam Passing Rates
It’s a two-day uphill battle. The bar exam is regarded as the most challenging testing experience ever designed.
In 2018, it was reported that only 74.82% of takers passed the bar exams. This is down a few percentage points compared to the 77.34% recorded for 2017. The schools that usually place on top are New York University with 97.35%, Columbia with 97.28%, Harvard with 96.85%, Yale with 96.76%, and Liberty with 95.64% passing rates.
If you’re from any of these schools, you did your research thoroughly.
Getting Ready
The passing rate for the University of San Francisco was 33.33% in 2018, and Whittier College registered a passing rate below 22%. If you studied in these schools and other bottom dwellers as far as passing rate is concerned, you need to prepare hard for the bar exam. Here are a few ideas that you should consider:
- Customize your study schedule. While you are probably going to review full time, you would still need to do other stuff like washing your clothes or going to the grocery stores. Make sure that these errands are not a distraction. Customizing your schedule also means following a strict plan based on your needs. Do you need to focus more on taxation? Allocate more time for that. If you’re following a review course, step back, get an overview of what’s on the schedule, and set your priorities.
- Dry-run exams. Shows do dress rehearsals before the actual performance. Working on practice test exams gets you in the right mindset and can help calm your nerves — time yourself to simulate a real exam scenario.
- Get free materials. You get loads of materials if you’re on a review course. But you can also find free materials online, which can serve as references. Hoard as many materials as you can and practice on them.
- Memorization is important. Memorizing the law is essential and, more specifically, the rules as it applies to the facts of a case. A thorough discussion of the regulations in your essay is the one that will be scrutinized for your grade.
You’re almost there. It’s going to be easier said than done. But these pointers might help you get that “Atty.” before your name.
