Unless you are taking the Louisiana or Washington state bar exam, you will be taking the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) when you take your bar exam (although starting July 2013, Washington state will begin using the MBE, leaving only Louisiana without the MBE). It’s a six-hour, 200 multiple-choice question test and is administered each year on the last Wednesday in February and July. For those interested in timing, 6 hours for 200 questions equates to 1.8 minutes (1 minute and 48 seconds) per question.
As for the subjects tested, it is a 6 subject test, pretty much equally distributed as there are 33 questions each of contracts and torts and for the rest of the subjects (con law, crim law and procedure, evidence and real property) there are 31 questions each. This adds up to 190 questions. “But, you said it was a 200 question test! What about the remaining 10 questions?” Well, those other 10 questions are experimental and not graded, but since you have no way of knowing which questions are part of the 190 graded questions and which are the 10 experimental ones, you must answer all 200 questions.
Another area of question/concern on the MBE is the scoring. Everyone wants to know how it’s graded. It’s a scantron test, so a machine grades it. Each correct answer is 1 point. So, if you correctly answer 125 out of 190, your raw score will be 125. However, there is a scale for each administration of the MBE to ensure that if one MBE is harder than another, that the scores scaled appropriately. The scales vary from exam to exam, but as an example, if the scale for a particular MBE is +20 points, and you score a 125 raw score, your scaled score (the one that is reported) would be a 145. The scaled score is the one that is counted.
How about some tips for studying? There is quite a bit of misinformation out there, so be careful. Everyone has an opinion on the “right” way to study for the bar exam. The truth is that everyone is different, and what worked for one person might not necessarily work for another. So if someone tells you “You need to do at least 3,000 practice questions to pass the MBE”, or “You need to put in at least 400 hours studying”, realize that there is no magic formula for passing the bar exam, whether it’s number of hours per day studying, or number of practice questions completed. You need to figure out what works for you. Whatever is the best way for you to learn the required law and apply it correctly on the MBE is the right way for you to study. If that means doing 20 questions per day, then good. If that means doing 50 questions per day, then good. But determine what works for you, and not what worked for someone else.
When it comes to bar exam studying, I generally feel that less is more. I teach a quality over quantity approach. When someone comes to me and says “I did 5,000 practice MBE questions and still failed the exam”, I ask them what they learned from doing those 5,000 practice questions and what improvement they saw during that time in their ability to correctly answer MBE questions. The response is usually silence or confusion as they cannot clearly state what they learned from doing those questions. What that tells me is that they simply went through the motions without knowing “why” they were doing what they were doing. Ask yourself “why am I using this study method?” and if you have a good answer for it, then you are probably on the right track.
Good luck studying over the next 2+ months and post a comment if you have any questions.
