Week 1: Barbri & Adaptibar: the "missing manuals"

Howdy, preppers! It's go time--time to start studying for the bar exam!

This is the first in a weekly series of blog posts in which I will provide study tips and bar-exam updates. I'll send out an email whenever I post new content (unfortunately, you cannot simply "subscribe" to the blog).

This first post discusses last week's bar-exam bootcamp (for those who missed it) and how to navigate Barbri and Adaptibar.

Bar-Exam Bootcamp

Barbri 101

The Barbri website can be a little confusing. Here’s how to use it.

TL;DR version: Log in. Note the “estimated hours per day." Click Start Studying. Complete the first exercise on the list. Repeat until you have worked at least the “estimated hours.” Don’t fall behind!

When you log into Barbri, the first thing you will see is your Personal Study Plan splash screen:

This is mostly self-explanatory. The “estimated hours per day” assumes you will study an equal number of hours every day until the exam. If you are, say, working half days on Sunday, you’d need to add more time to this calculation. The most important thing on the splash screen is the “Start Studying” button. Just click it!

Next up is the “My Assignments” page:

What if you fall behind or want to work ahead? Resist the urge to jump around in the sequence! Simply continue to complete the next assignment. Barbri will always show the most useful assignment at the top of the list (and that may change if you fall behind). Add more hours to your study day to catch up or get ahead, and keep working the list of assignments displayed on your “Recommendations” page. Pro tip: Don’t fall behind! Preppers who get a little behind tend to fall further and further behind until it’s too late to catch up.

The sidebar (2) gives you different options for viewing the list of assignments. E.g., you can see what’s coming up in any given week by clicking “Entire course.” The bottom radio button—“More practice”—contains additional assignments not on the main sequence. These extra assignments are (1) “AMPS” (multiple-choice questions on black-letter law—not at all like the “application” MCQs on the bar exam) and (2) bar-exam-style MCQs. Skip the AMPS. The other MCQs are ok (just ok), but if you want more practice, your time would be better spent in Adaptibar or answering practice essay questions.

This page shows your progress in Barbri using several different metrics. First up is the whole-course and weekly progress window (1). The most important thing on this page is the progress slider (2), which compares your progress with your target progress. If you are within 2% of where you should be, the slider is green; if you fall behind, it turns red. Do not let this get more than 2% behind! Bar prep is hard enough; playing catch-up is even harder. Just so you know, I have a dashboard that shows me everyone’s progress meter on one page, and I look at it (at least!) once per day. Yes, Big Brother is watching! Make me happy, and keep that progress slider “green.” The lower part of the screen shows your week-by-week progress.

The other progress charts show your progress through the assignments for the different MBE topics (3), your progress through the essay topics (4), your scores by week and topic on practice MBE questions (5), and your percentile ranking by week and topic on practice MBE questions (6).

Now let’s talk about the Barbri books

You’ve got a lot of books! All of the books have a 2- to 4-letter abbreviation on the spine, and your Barbri assignments refer to them by abbreviation. Here’s what the books are:

1. Conviser Mini Reviews (CMR): Condensed outlines. Barbri will tell you to review some of these before the related lectures.
   

2. Multistate Performance Test Workbook (MPT): Lots of MPTs and sample answers. Also includes “assigning memos” from some of the more unusual MPT types.
   

3. MBE Practice Questions (MPQ): What it says. Questions and explanatory answers.
   

4. MEE Testing (MEET): Lots of practice essays and answers.
   

5. Simulated MBE (MSE): The 6-hour simulated MBE you will take about halfway thru prep.

In addition to the dead-tree outlines, Barbri provides “full” online, electronic outlines to the bar-tested topics (BarBri>Bookshelf>MEE-MBE Materials. Scroll to the right to see the "full" outlines).

Why so many outlines? Each represents a different level of abstraction/detail. The lecture handouts are the least detailed but contain the most-tested topics. The Conviser Mini Reviews are mid-level detail. The full outlines contain the most detail. Barbri will not tell you to read the full outline! That would be a waste of time. Instead, Barbri will tell you to review either the CMR or an even shorter “overview” (e.g., for Torts and Corporations) before the lecture and the lecture handout during the lecture. So what are you supposed to do with the full outlines? Remember when I said self-testing and practice are hugely important parts of bar prep? When you practice essays or MCQs and realize you do not know the law well enough to answer the question, do your best (as you might have to on exam day), then look up the law in the outlines. Start with the lecture handout. If you can’t find the law there, move to the CMR, and then to the full outline. So: The purpose of the full outline is to fill in the gaps in the other outlines, and that’s how you will use them.

Some preppers ask whether you can mark up the books and still get your deposit back. Yes, you can!

Two caveats about using the Barbri materials: (1) When you watch the lectures, watch them in real-time; do not stop and start the lecture in an effort to keep up. The lecture is important, but mostly for context and overview. You simply don’t have time to slow it down. Some people watch the lectures at 1.5x speed; I don’t recommend that, but it’s ok as long as you can keep up. (2) Do not waste time creating your own outlines! Barbri gave you plenty of outlines. Some preppers create one-page summaries of the outlines; that’s ok, but anything more is time wasted.

Customizing the Barbri Schedule

Barbri (and this feature is unique to Barbri) allows you to customize your study schedule by telling Barbri which days per week you plan to study and whether you plan to take off any additional days. To access the schedule pages, click "View and Customize schedule" on the Home tab:

You can change your desired start date in the right-hand column. To tell Barbri which days of the week you plan to study, click Edit Schedule:

On the Edit Schedule page, uncheck the day you plan to take off each week (most preppers take off one day per week--unless they start too late). In this example, I told Barbri I plan to take each Sunday off. In the right column, the number of hours per day and total study days change accordingly. Click Save to save your new schedule.

To schedule other days off, simply click the desired days on the calendar and click Set as Day Off:

Two important notes about days off: First, every time you mark a day off, Barbri recalculates your schedule and gives you more work on the other days. Second, I strongly recommend not taking more than two days off in a row! More than that, and you will have trouble getting back into the study groove--and you will start to slide down the "forgetting curve." The only two-day break I suggest is July 3 and 4, but make sure you are rested and ready to hit the books on the morning of July 5.

Adaptibar 101

“Practice Questions” mode shows you one question at a time, then shows you an explanatory answer. “Exam” mode does not show you any answers until you answer all the questions in the set (however many questions you asked for).

On the Practice Questions screen, select the topics you want to study (this should almost always be a mix of topics to leverage the “interleaving” effect) and make sure you check the “Exclude MBE Complete Practice Exam Questions/Exclude MBE Study Aid Questions” boxes:

The Complete Practice Exams and Study Aids are 4, 100-question sets that you will complete later in bar prep, and you do not want to see those questions before you are ready to answer those question sets.

“Exam” mode allows you to choose not only the broad topics you want to practice but also the subtopics within those topics:

This will be very useful later in bar prep when you want to do a little focused practice on a topic that you find particularly troublesome.

How do I know how many questions I should do on Adaptibar every day?

If you are wondering how many Adaptibar questions you should do per day while you are studying for the bar exam, you can use our patented (not really) Adaptibar calculator to help you find the answer. Like I mentioned above, you should complete at least 1,300 Adaptibar questions throughout your bar-prep. In order to use the Adaptibar calculator, find your exam date on the spreadsheet and enter in the number of questions that you have already completed. The spreadsheet will tell you how many questions to answer per day to hit a 1,300, 1,700, or 1,900 target. The spreadsheet assumes that you will do all six 100-question practice exams in Adaptibar. The questions-per-day on the spreadsheet is for every day except the days where you complete the Barbri or Themis simulated MBE and the Adaptibar practice exams (the CPEs and Study Aids).

That's all for this week. Feel free to reach out to me, Prof. Deutsch, or your mentor anytime. Until next week: