Category: MBE

Happy New Year February 2014 bar exam takers! The Christmas decorations are starting to come down, New Year’s Eve hangovers are mostly gone, and the holidays are officially behind us now. What does all this mean? Time to get on a regular study schedule. Barbri has officially started and so have I, which means that every day there is some amount of studying going on, even if it’s only an hour or two. Try to have a positive outlook right now even if you did not study as much as you would have liked to (or at all) during the holidays. We’ve got about 50 days until the bar exam which doesn’t sound like much, but it is in fact a decent amount. Put your study schedule together, make a plan and start to follow it. It takes dedication and discipline to pass the bar exam, but being organized and smart about things helps. Don’t just randomly study from a gigantic pile of bar review materials each day. Instead, create a plan to help prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed by studying from a smaller, more manageable set of materials. And of course, if you have any general questions about the bar exam, feel free to drop me a line or post a comment here.

We’ve got some preliminary numbers on the MBE from the July 2013 bar exam.  Looks like we had a nice scale with the mean coming in at 144.3 with a range of 41 – 189.9.  Kudos to whoever got within 0.1 points of a perfect scaled score of 190!  We’ll look more closely at the scale when more results are out.  Until then, hang tight as results are coming out slowly over the next month or so here across the country.

The official national mean scores for the Feb 2013 MBE exam have been posted.  Looks like people did slightly better this past February than usual as the mean was 138.0, which is about a point or so higher than the typical Feb mean.  The range of scoring was pretty normal, showing a low score of 73.3 to a most excellent high score of 183.2.  Good luck to everyone still waiting for results to be released for their jurisdiction.

So last week we received a nice memo from the President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) letting us know that the long-awaited changes to the MBE are now official and that starting with the February 2015 examination, we will be seeing Civil Procedure as the 7th tested subject.  As you know, the MBE has 200 multiple-choice questions, of which 190 are scored items and 10 are experimental questions that are not graded.  We’ve seen civ pro-like questions for some time in those experimental questions, but now it’s official.  With the addition of Civil Procedure to the MBE, that means that the number of questions per topic will decrease. Starting in 2015, there will be 28 questions covering Contracts, and 27 questions covering each of the six remaining topics, for a total of 190 graded questions, and of course the 10 experimental. Every U.S. jurisdiction but Louisiana uses the MBE.

The NCBE has promised to release test specifications for the MBE Civil Procedure items no later than June 30 of this year. In the meantime, the specifications for Civil Procedure, already a topic on the Multistate Essay Examination, are available on the NCBE website, http://www.ncbex.org.  3 years seems far away but for those of you in law school that will be taking the exam after July 2014, this will affect you.  Whether or not this is good news or bad news depends on whether you dislike civ pro more or less than the other 6 subjects.  Here is a link to the official memo that was sent out.

As for the Feb 2013 MBE that we just saw, it was tough as usual, but no major surprises.  Evidence questions were a touch trickier than usual, but the question length was the same and time was not as much a factor this time as it normally is.