Howdy! This week, I want to talk about the MEE (the Multistate Essay Exam) and the importance of answering practice essay questions now! Read all the way to the end for info about our in-house MEE bank. Read on, or click the links below to jump to a topic.

All About Essays

The MEE contains 6 essays on 12 topics; essay prompts can combine multiple topics. Except for BA, Wills and Estates, Family Law, Secured Transactions, and Conflict of Laws, the topics are the same as on the MBE (Civ Pro, Evidence, Con Law, Real Property, Contracts, Torts, and Crim Law & Procedure). That means you have less law to study than did Texas examinees of yesteryear, and that’s a good thing! The UBE grades on a 6-point scale; 4 is considered “passing.”

Why practice writing essays?

When you write practice essays, you are working on 2 crucial things: (1) You are perfecting the skill of writing a bar-style essay in 30 minutes and (2) you are learning/reinforcing/filling in gaps in your knowledge of the law—building your “cognitive schema.” Let’s break those 2 things down.

The skill of writing a bar-exam essay

Barbri/Themis will teach you the ideal format for a bar-exam essay. It’s important to master that format. It’s what your bar grader is expecting; meeting the grader’s expectation is likely to result in a higher score. Beyond the format, the ability to crank out a good answer in 30 minutes (and to do that 6 times in a row in 3 hours!) is vital. To master the format and timing, you have to write practice essays—and write them out all the way; outlining is not enough. After you’ve written enough essays to know you can crank out an essay in the optimal format in 30 minutes, you can and should start outlining most of the essays you review. Until then, you should fully write out most of the answers.

Learning the law by writing essays

As I’ve written before (and will write again . . . and again!), self-testing is the best way to learn what you need to know for the bar exam, make it stick, and be able to recall it on exam day. Every time you try to answer an essay question and have to look up the law in an outline, you fill in a gap in your knowledge. Further, MEE questions tend to be somewhat repetitive. There are only so many ways to test Secured Transactions. Thus, the more practice questions you answer during prep, the more likely you are to see something familiar on exam day.

When and how to practice essays

Start practicing essays now. Pick topics that you have either covered in Barbri or that you studied in law school. Don’t wait until you have “mastered” a topic; practice is how you attain mastery. As Barbri covers more topics, add them to your essay mix. Do not focus on one topic; in every essay-practice session, answer questions from a variety of topics (this harnesses the power of “interleaving” or mixed practice as well as spaced repetition). Practice every day; “essay practice” should be on your daily study schedule.

Write vs. Outline

At first, write out every answer. When you have mastered the format (and Barbri confirms this on one or more graded essays), start outlining 2 or 3 essays for every one you write out (you should continue to fully write out some essays to keep that skill sharp).

When you attempt to answer a question and do not know (or cannot recall) the law, don’t panic; that’s why you’re practicing! Write down as much of the law as you can (even if you are making it up; you might draw a blank on exam day, and a good guess will always score higher than no answer). Then apply the law that you wrote down and reach a conclusion. Then look at the sample answer to see what you missed, and review the relevant portion of the relevant outline to contextualize the law (where does this rule fit into the larger picture of, say, family law?) and review the subtopics in the same section of the outline. This is where the “deep” learning happens.

Essay-rule Flashcards

When you attempt an essay and realize you do not have a good grasp of the rule, copy the rule verbatim from a sample answer (or an outline) onto a flashcard. Work your essay flashcards at least once per day (you don’t have to go through the entire deck).

When you go through the flashcards and get the answer to a flashcard right, move that card to the back of the stack. If you get the answer wrong, put that card about three cards back so that it comes up again almost immediately. This is the easiest way to leverage the power of spaced repetition.

If you prefer electronic flashcards, brainscape.com is free if you create your own decks, uses adaptive learning/spaced repetition (pretty much what I described in the prior paragraph), has apps for Android and iPhone, and is easy to use.

Graded practice

Submit your essay answers when Barbri (or Themis) assigns them to you; you’ll get a response from the grader quicker if you submit the essay when the grader is expecting it. Barbri and Themis will grade unlimited essays for you. Learning to assess your own work is important (and faster), but a second set of eyes and objective feedback can be very helpful.

The TAMU Law MEE Bank

The Texas BLE has a now-useless bank of hundreds of essays and answers from the old-school Texas bar exam. Texas has no similar bank of MEE questions. So we made one ourselves. Here’s the link to the Google Drive folder. You must be logged into your @tamu.edu Google account to access the folder (if you do not have an @tamu.edu address, email me, and I will set up access for you with a different email address). The folder contains a spreadsheet listing all the questions by topic and date (make a copy to check off essays as you do them), plus the questions and answers organized in folders by topic and date.

A good way to randomize your essay practice and mix all the topics is to download all six essays from a past exam (say, July '19) and answer them.

That’s it for this week. As always, call or email me if you have questions or just want to talk.

Question of the Week

Q: I have a question about Adaptibar—specifically, about "percent correct" targets. I know we should be aiming for 60% correct or better by exam day. Right now, I'm in the low 50s. Are there interim, weekly percent-correct targets we should aim for?

A: No, not really—for two reasons: First, once you've answered around 300 questions in Adaptibar, the "Adapt" part kicks in, and Adaptibar starts forcing you to work on your weaknesses by sending you more questions on topics where you are underperforming and fewer questions on topics where you are doing well. (That, by the way, is why Adaptibar is worth every penny it costs and why, in my opinion, it is superior to Themis's "UWorld QBank" product.) Because Adaptibar forces you to confront your weaknesses, your percent-correct will plateau and maybe even decline—until mid-July, when most preppers turn the corner and their scores start rising again. Frankly, this can be a little soul-crushing. But it works, so keep plugging away in Adaptibar. If you don't have Adaptibar, get it!

Second, you are learning the law mostly by answering practice questions. Watching lectures and reading outlines contribute just 20% to your learning; they merely provide the scaffolding. The real learning—the other 80%—comes from answering practice questions (both multiple-choice and essays). Crushing a set of multiple-choice questions gives you the warm fuzzies, and that's great. But getting the answer wrong is actually more valuable at this stage because it identifies a gap in your knowledge and gives you the opportunity to fill that gap by learning the rule that would have allowed you to get the answer right. So though your Adaptibar score will languish, that's not a bad thing (as long as you are making the effort to fill those gaps).

In summary: There are no interim Adaptibar targets. Your score will plateau before it goes up. But that's not a bad thing; that's Adaptibar working its magic.

One more thing about Adaptibar and targets: Adaptibar provides much data to me—including how TAMU preppers stack up against all preppers in the country and those studying for the Texas exam. Here's where we are as of today:

And here's where we were on exam day in July 2021 (I cannot generate a chart as of May 30, like the one above; but on May 30, 2021, our average % correct was 57.4%, vs. today's 55%):

As you can see, we're currently being outperformed nationally and in Texas, whereas by exam day last year we outperformed the nation and Texas.

Why does this matter? The MBE is "curved" across all examinees in the nation. So you, individually, want to outperform the national average to make sure you are on the "passing" side of the curve. I want every TAMU prepper to outperform the national average.

The high pass rates we've seen over the past three years didn't "just happen." They happened because the '19, '20, and '21 grads worked incredibly hard. I know you're working hard, too, and I expect your hard work to pay similar dividends. Right now, we are, collectively, a little behind where I'd like us to be. Let this be a collective wake-up call. Keep grinding. Make every day count. And do lots of Adaptibar!

Have a question of your own? Email me anytime at john.murphy@tamu.edu.