Law Students

CA Bar Exam - Day 2

By Athar Khan

Today we had the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) which is a total of 200 multiple choice questions tested in two 3-hour sessions with 100 questions each.

I was hoping to do well enough on this portion to be able to apply it towards the Illinois Bar Exam that I have to take in February 2009. I think I walked away feeling fairly okay about it so hopefully, I wont have to do this section again in February.

MBEs are the most difficult part of the bar exam for me because they are so mercilessly digital — an answer is either right or not. There is simply no partial credit for a second-best answer or a half-right answer. I also find it difficult because I always have to write something down to absorb it — even if it is line between the opposing parties or a timeline of events and that takes up a lot of time. Trust me, I have tried doing these questions without any scratchwork and I spend the same amount of time re-reading the question. So, it really doesn’t cost me that much more time to do it.

As if keeping pace wasn’t enough, one also has to remain calm and focused. There are some questions where I fell behind the 1.8 Minutes/Question average and had to catch up elsewhere. My solution to this was that when I got to the long (one and a half column Property questions) I made an immediate best guess based on just the question and the reasoning within the answers rather than reading the entire fact pattern. That helped gain a lot of time and I managed to finish the morning session. The afternoon session was harder and I had about 20 questions to go with about 12 to 15 minutes left. Luckily, two long Property questions showed up and the same stop-loss technique worked okay. I finished just as I was answering the last one and I couldn’t go back to fix a few questions (by actually reading them). That’s really irritating me right now. Oh well — I guess if a few MBEs were going to keep me from passing, I probably never did deserve to pass anyway. Can’t really bank on a margin-of-error to bring me up to a passing score.

Although time management was an issue, I am happy that I wasn’t stressed and remained calm. Can’t really ask for much more than that I suppose.

Tomorrow is the last day of the exam. Will be back in Irvine tomorrow night and will be sure to catch up on emails, voice messages, etc.

Full post as published by Atharkhan on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).