Week 6: Interpreting your "midterm" score

Midterm how-to recap

I wrote extensively about the Barbri "midterm" last week. Here's the TL;DR recap:

Before the Sim MBE: Complete SA 1 in Adaptibar (Exams>NCBE Exams>SA 1). It’s a good warm-up for the sim MBE.

During the Sim MBE: Simulate exam conditions as closely as possible. No snacks, no music, no pets. Complete the exam using the printed sim MBE book (Barbri's "MSE" book) and the bubble sheet.

After the Sim MBE: Enter your answers on Barbri’s website. That way, you will receive your score immediately. Watch the sim MBE review lectures the next two days.

How to interpret your Barbri midterm scores

To see your scores, click the Sim MBE icon on your “Progress” screen:

Here’s the report for an examinee from a prior bar exam (an examinee who passed on the first try):

Area “1” shows your overall raw score, percent correct, and percentile ranking (vs. everyone who has taken the simulated MBE this bar-prep season. The red line on the bar graph shows your percentile rank graphical form. Note: Barbri cannot calculate the percentiles until a lot of preppers have taken the exam, so your report may not show percentiles at first. Keep checking back.

Area “2” breaks your performance down by topic and subtopic, again by number correct, percent correct, and percentile ranking. This is the important part, as I will explain below.

What to do with your report: First, don’t freak out! This is not the bar exam, and the bar exam is not tomorrow. (By the same token, if you scored well, do not rest on your laurels! If you don't keep practicing, you will slide down the "forgetting curve".) The Sim MBE is a diagnostic that tells you where you have room for improvement. From here on out, the theme for the MBE (and the MEE) is “work on your weaknesses.” The goal of the Sim MBE is to help you identify those weaknesses. Here’s what to do about them:

First, as you read your report, look for subtopics where the exam asked 5 or more questions and your score was particularly low (I circled a few examples on the sample report above). Low scores are weaknesses (obviously). The number of questions for a given subtopic indicates how many questions you can expect for the subtopic on exam day. Weakness on a highly-tested topic is an opportunity to make up several points between now and exam day!

Time for "Focused Practice"

Here’s what I told the student whose score appears above: You’re weak on Torts>Strict Liability, Contracts>Discharge/Breach, and Contracts: Remedies (among others, but those are the subtopics that would fit on the screenshot above). It’s time for some focused practice on those subtopics. Focused practice is the opposite of mixed (or interleaved) practice; we will focus on one subtopic at a time.

Let’s take your worst score first: Remedies. Get the Contracts CMR (Convisor Mini Review, the outline book). Read the table of contents for the Remedies section to reorient yourself to what that section covers. Now flip to the Remedies section in the CMR and review it. But don’t just read it! For each heading, cover up the text that follows (with your hand or a sheet of paper) and see how much you can remember before you review it. Then uncover the text and see how much you got right. Then cover it up again and try to recite what you just read. Lather, rinse, repeat for all of the Remedies sub-sub-topics. This is like making flashcards, but faster! You can do this with essay rules, too!

Now switch over to Adaptibar

Click Exams ([1] in the image below). Click Contracts [2]. In the list of subtopics, check Remedies [3]. Under exam name, type “Remedies Focused Practice” (or whatever). Be sure to exclude Complete Practice Exam and Study Aid questions [4]. Enter a number of questions—at least 5 but not more than 10 (why not more? Because in Exam mode, you will not see the explanatory answers until you answer all the questions, and if you answer more than 10, too much time will elapse between when you attempted to answer the question and when you review the explanation). Click Start. Answer the questions under exam timing (1m48s per question average). Review the answers. If you are still struggling with a concept, review that sub-sub-section of the CMR again.

Repeat this process for 7 days, covering each of the highly-tested subtopics on which you received a low score (if you complete them all in fewer than 7 days, start over from the top of the list). After 7 days, complete SA2 in Adaptibar to re-evaluate your realtive strengths and weaknesses.

Remember, the goal for the MBE now is to work on your weaknesses as identified by the Sim MBE and thereby increase your score on exam day. Focusing on your weakest subtopics among the highly-tested subtopics provides the most bang for your study-time buck.

More MBE simulated exams: Adaptibar has 4, 100-question practice exams, starting with SA (Study Aid) 1 and ending with CPE (Complete Practice Exam) 2 (Exams>NCBE exams). Do them all. Complete CPE 2 four or five days before the exam and CPE 1 about a week before that. Don’t have Adaptibar yet? It’s not too late! (Use your @tamu.edu email and discount code TAMUAB21.) Barbri also has a couple of 100-question practice exams in its "MCQ Bank" (the link is at the top of your Barbri dashboard)—but the questions were written by Barbri, not the NCBE.

Freeing up time for more Adaptibar: With the Sim MBE behind you, your MBE practice will shift from Barbri to Adaptibar. When Barbri tells you to review an MBE-topic outline for 1.5 hours (or however long), mark the task “done” (so your Barbri percentage-complete doesn’t lag) and answer Adaptibar questions instead for 1.5 hours. When Barbri gives you a set of MCQs to answer, mark the task “done” (or just skip it) and answer Adaptibar MCQs instead. Why? The Adaptibar questions are NCBE-written questions and so should better reflect the kind of question you can expect to see on exam day. But if you have time, you should do the Adaptibar and Barbri questions; more practice is more better.

A little love for Themis?

As I mentioned last week, Themis's midterm comes a couple of weeks later than Barbri's. Until then, you can use your Themis "MBE PQs" report to identify subtopics that need your attention. Click on "MBE PQS," then click on a MBE topic to expand the subtopics (in this example, I clicked on "MBE Contracts & Sales"):

Identify the subtopics where Themis asked many questions (those are the heavily tested topics) and your score was relatively low (say, 50% or less). Jump into Adaptibar and do some focused practice using the instructions above.

Question of the week: Do laptop users get paper questions on exam day?

Yes! Everyone will receive hardcopy MPT packets and essay questions. Laptop users will answer the MPTs and essays on their laptops. Everyone receives hardcopy MBE questions, and everyone (including laptop users) must answer the questions on a scantron sheet. So when you practice MPTs and essays, consider printing out the packet or question (or at least not allowing yourself to copy and paste from the packet or question into your answer) to better simulate the exam experience. For the same reason, when you take the simulated MBE midterm, use a scantron sheet.

That's all for this week. As ever, if you have questions or need talked back from the ledge, email or call me or Prof. Deutsch. Our contact info is on this blog's home page.