Failed the Bar? Watch This Before Studying

If you failed the bar exam and your plan is to just study more or do more of the same, then you're more than likely going to fail again. I've worked with literally thousands of repeat takers and help them pass the bar exam. And here I'm going to go over some common mistakes that repeat takers make when they are studying for the bar exam. And just being aware of this upfront before you dive into a study plan, course, can make a huge difference in you passing or failing the bar exam. And we all know the goal is to never have to take the bar exam again and to invest everything you need to this time so that six months from now you're not thinking about the bar exam. You're thinking about becoming a lawyer or working as a lawyer or your swearing in ceremony or something that's much more positive. So um failing, you know, I want to start by saying it does not mean that you're not capable of passing the bar. It does not mean you're not smart. The bar exam has nothing to do with lawyering. So it does not mean that you're not going to be a good lawyer. The best lawyers I know failed the bar exam. What failing the bar exam means is that something in your strategy was missing. So you got to change your strategy. If you change your strategy for the next time that you take the bar exam, you will pass the bar exam. So I want to cover some common mistakes that students make when they are retaking the bar exam. And the first mistake is the most common and it's just simply doing more of the same. So same thing you already did. Oh, I failed while I get a free repeat of my course. I'm going to do the free repeat. If it didn't work the first time, it's not going to work this time. What's that quote about doing the same thing again and expecting a different result? It's not logical. Okay? You do not want to do the same thing and expect to get a different result. Um, some people also will just engage in the same passive studying, the same habits. They don't revamp their whole approach. If you are serious about passing the bar exam, you want a revamp. You want to start over with your approach. A lot of people who are repeating the bar exam, they don't change their strategy. Oftentimes, they don't even increase their hours because now this time you have to work or you have other obligations. You don't get to take a full 10 weeks off like you might have the first time. So, not only is it difficult because you have to change your strategy, but you also may have less time to study. And that's not helpful either. And that means that you really need to change your strategy going forward. There are two mindset changes that need to happen before you do anything else. The first mindset change that you need to get over as a repeat taker is this box checking mentality that a lot of first-time takers have and repeat takers have it too. And this is where you just complete a course and you just want to check off boxes. say, "Yes, I answered those multiple choice questions. I did those essays. I watched those lectures. " And the problem with this is it allows you to be a little bit lazy in critically evaluating whether or not you're really learning the material. So yeah, you can watch a tors lecture, answer some questions, but do you really know it? You know deep inside if you know it. Your course that's just asking you to check things off does not know. And so get out of this box checking mentality. The idea is not to check off boxes. The idea is to know deep inside that you know the law and that you're getting better. It doesn't mean that you don't want to complete your course or keep track of that. But what it does mean is you have to be critically evaluating your own progress, not just depending on an outside source such as a course. If you have a tutor or someone else who can help you, that can make a big difference because they'll be real with you if you are struggling. The other thing is there has to really be a sense of urgency to pass the bar exam. So, we had two students raise their score over 50 points this last round. They scored in the 210s on the uniform bar exam and they ended up in the 270s. That is a phenomenal point increase. Okay? And it just goes to show that it really doesn't matter what your score is. If you change your strategy and your outlook and what you're doing day by day, you can make monumental increases in your bar exam score. So bar exam score means less to me than your grit in your approach to studying. But I also want to share a story of a student that I had who came to me on his seventh time taking the bar exam. And what was unfortunate about this student is all the other times that he had taken the bar exam, he had literally been within five points of passing. So he was not far from passing the bar exam. But every single time he told himself, "Oh, I just need to just study a little bit more. I'm only missing five points. I only need five points. " In reality, you don't only need five points. You need 266 points or whatever your score is to pass the bar exam. and he was not studying with a sense of urgency. And that's what everybody needs to do. You want to study and say, "This is it. This is the last time. " So even if you only failed by five points, don't go into your study period saying, "I only need to make up five points. " Say, "I 50 points. " Say, "I want to get a score in the 300s. I want a score so high that it does not matter if I'm having a bad test day. " That's the mentality that you want

to go into in the bar exam. So the seven time taker, he spent three and a half years essentially studying for the bar exam. It cost him thousands of hours of studying, thousands of dollars in bar exam repeat taker fees, hotel fees, bar exam course fees, just different thing, little things here and there that he was investing in. It cost him thousands of dollars in lost salary because he made a lot more as a lawyer than he did as a law clerk. And so for three and a half years, he was missing out on that salary. And it also cost him a ton of stress and like a mental and emotional strain. He was putting off events like getting engaged and other things like that because he wanted to pass the bar exam first, which a lot of people do. It's common. But the reason I'm telling you all this is think of what you need to do to pass this time so that you don't end up in a scenario like that. He ended up spending, it wasn't even, it was like $5,000 on tutoring, which was so little compared to the other costs over the past three and a half years. And he increased his score significantly, passed the bar, moved on with his life, and it worked out really well. But he could have done that on his second time, not his seventh time. So study with a sense of urgency and tell yourself, no matter how many points you need, that you need more. You need to make up more than that because you want there to be a nice buffer on bar exam day. You don't want to have to depend on having a great day and having fair graders. You never know what's going to happen. You want to be able to build in that buffer. The second mistake that I see bar exam repeat takers make is a lot of passive studying. So, for example, they will passively watch lectures. They will passively read outlines. They'll passively copy their outlines onto flashcards. They'll study while they're watching TV. Um, if you can study while you're watching TV, you're not studying. That is not studying. You have to be focused when you study. And the best way to make sure that you are actively learning when you're studying rather than passively learning is some part of you is moving. Like if you're just staring at an outline like this, that's not studying. You retain so little of what you read. Same with if you're watching a course lecture. If you can just stare at a screen, it's not studying. It's not active studying. You're not retaining it. You're thinking about what you're going to eat for lunch. You're not going to be engaging with the material and you will not remember the material. But a great way to do it is to actively study. So, if you're taking notes while you're watching a course lecture and not just being a stenographer filling in blanks in a lecture handout, but really taking notes, if you are instead of just reading an outline, please don't read an outline, memorize the outline. So, basically what you want to do is cover up a section of the outline and see if you can jot down the rules quickly or cover up a section of the outline and see if you can speak it out loud. Some people say, "Well, why not just make flashcards? " Like, I like to make flash cards. And flash cards can be good for small purposes. Like for example, let's say you're having trouble with the hearsay exceptions. Yeah, put them on flash cards. Fine. But the problem with flash cards is it's a way for people to feel like they're studying without studying. Remember, we're lazy. We're going to try to get around kind of act the hard work of actually having to do this. And one of the ways of being lazy and feeling productive is to copy entire outlines onto flashcards. It takes forever to do that. Oftent times you don't even have the chance to really go back and look at the flash card and it's not necessary. Part of the bad thing about flash cards is once you start mixing them up, you don't know exactly where you are in the outline. So it's like, okay, you're looking at battery and then you have something with a strict liability tort or something, they're in different sections of the outline and it's going to be harder for you to figure out where things fit in the bigger picture if you're just using flashcards. If you are instead using your outline, what's nice about using an outline is you'll get where you are in the bigger picture as you're memorizing the rules and as you're going over the law. So, it's just much better to use an outline and use that to memorize. Also, better to have it printed than have it electronic. If you hate your outlines, get different outlines. We have great outlines at JD Advising, but even if you don't use ours, find something you like because this is kind of the backbone of your bar exam prep. You have to know the law. You have to have it memorized. And the best way to have it memorized is to have a good outline printed and actively reviewing it. And that's really where it starts. So, like that's where bar prep starts. If you try to dive into answering questions on evidence without memorizing the law the best that you can, you're gonna just get frustrated. You're gonna not score well on multiple choice. You're going to miss things on the essays. And then some people's solution to this is, "Oh, I didn't score well on my multiple choice. I'm going to just keep doing multiple choice. " That's not a good way to improve your score. You're going to learn like little bits and pieces here and there, but you're not solving the bigger problem, which is that you're missing the foundation. So, go back to the outline, memorize it, and then start doing questions. Another common mistake that I see is students who are taking the bar exam often don't have a good feedback loop. So, for example, they'll write essays, but no one's really reviewing them. They'll hand in their essays for a grade and they don't really review the feedback. Or they review it briefly, but they don't really take it to heart. Okay, what's the point even? Or they answer multiple choice questions and they maybe understood why they got something wrong and maybe they don't

but they don't write it down and memorize it again. So the important thing is having a good feedback loop and making sure that you are getting a lot of feedback from yourself. So it is great to have a course. It's grader and it's even better to have a tutor because they're going to see things you can't see. They have experience, but the place you want to start is with yourself. And even if you sign up for tutoring with us or a course, this is something that we have all of our students do because you retain the most when you give feedback to yourself. So, let me give you an example. When you write an essay, let's say that you write the essay, okay, normally you hand it into your course. Here's the problem with that. You're going to hand it in. Either you're going to get some AI grading or it's going to take a while to come back and then by the time you get it back, you can't even really remember why you wrote what you wrote. The feedback sometimes is good, sometimes it's not, but it's hard to kind of like really incorporate that into what you're doing. It's already been a while since you even thought about that essay. So, what you should do instead of just handing an essay is grade it yourself. Okay? We call this self-grading where you basically take the model answer and you start to like write down what you did right and what you did wrong. So what I do is you can either handw write it or if it's on your laptop just in a different color font go in and say oh got this rule wrong misses fact this fact in the fact pattern should have alerted me to this fact I missed this issue because I didn't read the call the question carefully I missed a whole issue or I forgot to flip the page or whatever the problem is that way you will remember this so much more because now you made a mistake and you gave yourself feedback that's going to stick in your brain to take it a step further. If you're not good at remembering things, like I am not good at memorizing, and I say this because nobody's good at memorizing. We're humans. We need to repeat things over and over to get it into our memory. So, if you're a regular person, a regular human, what I also recommend that you do is save this in a file on your laptop, or even better, print it, put it in a binder, and go back and review your self-grading on a regular basis. go back and kind of say like okay this one I missed the issue I did this I didn't listen to this fact uh I forgot dine declaration and this is what it is basically go back and actively review the feedback that you gave yourself you will see your essay scores improve so much I started having our students do this when I noticed that students who self-graded in our essay classes did so much better than students that just handed essays in. So, we used to give people the option like, "Oh, self-grade. It's great. We recommend it. But if you can't, that's okay. Just hand it in and we'll grade it. " And students who self-graded got better quickly, their scores were higher, they passed the bar exam at a higher rate, and they went into the bar exam more confidently, and they came out more confidently because by the time they had taken the exam, they had kind of gotten to the mind of a grader. So, they had an idea if they were writing, you know, basically what was expected of them. they kind of knew how they were performing versus the students that just would hand essays in, they had no clue. They were anxious from the beginning of the time they started studying until they got results. They really weren't able to properly evaluate their progress and they weren't seeing as much improvement as a result. So, make sure that self-grading is something that you're incorporating into your essays. Same with multiple choice. A lot of people say, "Oh, I answered multiple choice questions. " And I would check and see if I got the answer right by looking at the explanation, make sure that I got it right for the right reasons. Or if I got it wrong, I'll read the explanation and make sure that I got it right the next time. But the problem is, if you are answering multiple choice questions, you're probably answering a lot. And if you just get something wrong and then you read the explanation, that is a passive way of approaching multiple choice questions. just reading is not going to help you learn. Okay, we just covered this when we were talking about the outlines. It's passive. So, what you really need to do is actively engage with that material and you need to repeat it. The best way to do it is to just briefly jot down on a legal pad um why you got something wrong. So, if you didn't know the elements of a dying declaration, write down those declaration on your legal pad. If you got it wrong because you read the facts too quickly, write read facts too quickly on your legal pad. Then, you have one area that you can go and review everything you got wrong. So, not only is this a way of actively engaging with the material because you're not just randomly reading multiple choice question explanations and then forgetting about them, but it's also a way of repeating it to make sure that you remember it. And that is critical. So, those are just some ways that you can give yourself feedback loops. A huge mistake people make is thinking the more questions I answer, the better off I am. That could not be farther from the truth. Yes, you want to answer some minimum number of questions, but you don't have to answer thousands of questions. I cannot tell you how many people come to us and before they use our course or our tutoring, they say, "Oh, I answered 5,000 questions. " And

they still didn't pass. Because it's not quantity. You need to be dissecting and taking as much out of that question as possible and learning from every single mistake. Otherwise, you're just moving. you're doing things, but you're not actually retaining anything, and you're not going to see your progress in uh improve at all. Another mistake that repeat takers make is they start studying, they're motivated to get past the exam, great, but then they just dive into a plan. They say, "I'm repeating my course or I'm doing this, I'm doing that. " The problem with this is you have a lot of great information at your disposal. You have your score. You might have your essays. You probably have a score breakdown. So you can figure out how you performed on test day and you can figure out your strengths and your weaknesses. Once you figure those out, there's a lot you can do with them. For example, if you have a strength, do not ignore it. A lot of people say, "Oh, multiple choice is my weakness, so that's what I'm focusing on. " And usually when they say that there's two problems, usually first multiple choice is not their weakness. They just don't know how to read their score report. And then oftentimes the second problem is they just focus on their weakness and then their strengths get weak and then they still don't pass the bar exam. So what you really want to do is identify your strengths and weaknesses properly in your score report. So figure out how to read it. Look at your essays if possible if your jurisdiction gives those to you and then come up with a plan based on that. That's what's great about tutoring because a tutor can really help you come up with these plans. But even if you're self-studying and even if you're doing this by yourself, look at your strengths and come up with a plan to improve them. If writing is your strength, do not ignore that strength. That is a great strength. You can make exponential gains on the written portion of your bar exam without doing an exponential amount of work. Okay? So like if you're great at writing, then make sure that you are getting the top scores on those MPTs. This is great. You go into the bar exam, usually the MPT is first for a lot of people. you conquer the MPT, you feel confident going into the rest of the essay day and the multiple choice day. So, the point of this is do not ignore your strengths. Work on your strengths. In almost every jurisdiction, you do not need a certain score on the essays and the written portion and the multiple choice portion. What you need is that overall score. They don't care how you get there. So, if you're going to get there through your strengths, through the written portion in my example, then great. That's perfect. But you also shouldn't ignore your weaknesses. If you, for example, really struggle with real property, figure out how to learn real property. Maybe you need a new lecture, outline, a new tutor, new questions, a new approach. There could be a lot of things that help you understand that area of law. So, don't ignore your weaknesses, but don't ignore your strengths either. Overall, if you're a repeat taker, the strategy that you want to follow is look at your score report and your essays, diagnose your strengths and your weaknesses, make a plan based on that. Your basic plan should cover a few things. First, you want to make sure you understand the law. If you do not understand the law, you're going to be trying to memorize something you don't understand. And then even worse, applying the law when you don't understand it. It's going to be very difficult to apply the law to an essay or multiple choice question if you don't know what the heck it means. So, make sure you understand the law first. It could be through course lectures. study groups. It could be through a tutor. Then, you want to memorize the law. This is key. It's not watching lectures. It's not reading something. It's not making flashcards. It's nothing passive. You want to actively memorize the law using ideally your printed outlines that you love and quizzing yourself on them one by one. We have a lot of resources on this if you struggle with this. Memorization requires two things, active learning and repetition. Next, you want to apply the law. So, this means that you want to practice. You want to practice essays. multiple choice questions. And you want to use active learning through these self-grading these proper feedback loops so that you're actually improving your score through practice. And then lastly, you want to be tracking your progress, evaluating critically if you're doing everything that you need to do. So don't just check boxes. You want to make sure that you're actually doing what you need to do to pass the bar exam. Like I said at the beginning, I've helped thousands of repeat takers pass. If you are repeating the bar exam, it says nothing about your intelligence. ability to practice law. It just says you need a new strategy for the bar exam. And hopefully this helped you with