Barbri's Simulated MBE

Barbri's midterm--the Simulated MBE or "Sim"--is the single most important assignment in Barbri (preppers who don't complete the Sim fail the bar exam in disproportionately high numbers). The Sim is a full-day, six-hour simulation of the multiple-choice part of the bar exam. It's an important waypoint in bar prep because it will uncover your relative strengths and weaknesses. It also gives you a taste of what it feels like to answer bar-exam questions for two three-hour sessions. 

The on-campus Sim

To better simulate exam-day conditions, we'll host the Sim on campus. Taking the Sim in a classroom with a bunch of other stressed-out preppers is about as close to exam-day as you can get! If you live within driving distance, you should join us. 

We'll host the Sim on campus on Monday, June 24 (rooms TBD). For "standard time" students, the Sim will begin at 9am (same as the real exam). We'll serve lunch at noon (see below for the "order your lunch" form). The afternoon session will begin at about 1pm.

For time-accommodated students, we'll break the Sim across two days--just like the real exam. The Sim will begin at 8:30am Monday and end at 12:30pm. We'll repeat the same schedule on Tuesday for the second half of the Sim. Note: we will serve lunch on Monday only.

Before the Sim

Three or four days before the Sim, complete "MBE Study Aid 1" (SA1) in Adaptibar (Exams>NCBE Exams>SA 1). It’s the first of four 100-question practiced sets in Adaptibar and a good warm-up for the Sim. Maybe you've never answered 100 multiple-choice questions back to back before, and almost certainly not 100 bar-exam questions on all the bar-tested topics. Fatigue will be a factor. By taking SA1 before the Sim, you can build up your stamina so that your Sim results better reflect what you know and don't know as opposed to how tired you were for those last 15 questions! 

During the Sim

Take the Sim under simulated exam-time conditions:

• Take it in a distraction-free environment. Turn off your computer and phone. 

• No snacks or coffee. You can't have those on exam day. But you can have water.

• No music, pets, or other feel-good crutches. They won't be there on exam day.

• Complete the Sim on paper. You have a Barbri book that contains nothing but the Sim (don't forget to bring it to campus with you!). The first page of the book is a bubble sheet; tear it out and answer the questions with a pencil on the bubble sheet.  

After the Sim

Either the evening of or the morning after the Sim, copy your answers from the bubble sheet to the Barbri platform. Barbri will then generate a report reflecting your strengths and weaknesses. Why not simply answer the questions online in the first place? Because that's not how exam day will be!

How to interpret your Barbri Sim 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 in graphical form. Note: Barbri cannot calculate the percentiles until many preppers have taken the exam, so your report may not show percentiles at first. Keep checking back--or not; the percentile scores are not particularly relevant to success on the real exam.

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, don't rest on your laurels! If you don't keep practicing, you'll 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 (where "low" typically means 50% or less, but may be higher if you scored well on the Sim). 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 Study Aid 2 in Adaptibar to re-evaluate your relative 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! 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.   

Question of the Week

Q: Prof. Murphy, you suggested that when answering practice essay questions, we should spend 5 minutes "making up" a rule statement if we have no idea what the rule is. Could you give us some pointers on how to do that?

A: Sure! Let's take an example from the July 2020 exam (I'm omitting some irrelevant facts to keep this short):

The owner of a two-story building converted it into three two-bedroom apartments. The owner occupied the ground-floor apartment; the other two apartments were rental units. 

The owner then wrote the following advertisement and paid to have it published in the local newspaper:

Two 2-bedroom apartments for rent. Only professional women (but not lawyers) need apply.

Eight individuals applied to rent the apartments. Three were male accountants. Five were women, three of whom were lawyers. The owner told the men that she “[does] not rent to men.” She then rented one of the apartments to a female architect and the other to a female physician.

1. Did the owner violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by refusing to rent to men and lawyers? Explain.

[Link to question in MEE Bank] Note that in 2020, Barbri's Real Property lecture said something like, "The bar exam has never tested the Fair Housing Act, so I'm not going to talk about it" (but the FHA was covered in the outline). So many Barbri preppers had an "oh, shit!" moment when they read this question! But our grads (all but four of whom used Barbri) did well enough to achieve what, at the time, was our highest-ever pass rate by making up a rule statement.

Here's how I would make up a rule for this one:

• The Fair Housing Act sounds like anti-discrimination legislation. The facts mention gender 7 times, so sex discrimination must be part of the puzzle.

• Other anti-discrimination legislation, like Title VII, the ADA, or the ADEA, prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age.

• The FHA probably prohibits similar discrimination.

• So a reasonable rule statement and application would be, "The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in the sale or lease of residential real property based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age. Here, Owner refused to rent to men, which violated the FHA's prohibition on sex discrimination. But her refusal to rent to nonprofessionals or lawyers did not violate the FHA because it does not prohibit discrimination based on profession."

That's not a perfect rule statement, and the conclusion is partially wrong (the FHA has an exception for owner-occupied rentals with four or fewer units). But it's good enough to get at least some of the points attributable to that call of the question.

So: Look to the facts for some hints as to what might be important. Craft a rule addresses those facts. Use similar rules from analogous contexts for help. And use your common sense--the law usually makes sense! You probably won't earn a "6," but a "2" is much better than 0!

At the lunch break on day 2 of the February '24 bar exam, a prepper called my cell number. When I answered, she was sobbing uncontrollably. Through the tears, she said the questions on the first half of the MBE seemed much harder than the Barbri and Adaptibar practice questions and made her doubt that she knew enough law to pass (btw, this is a fairly common sentiment on exam day!). I had her do a quick breathing exercise. Almost immediately, she got herself under control. While she continued to practice the breath technique, I reminded her how much work she had put in and how her scores predicted success. After a few minutes, she was back on solid ground. She went on to pass with flying colors.

The breathing technique I had her use was the "physiological sigh." It's simple: Two breaths in through the nose, followed by a long exhale through the mouth: In--in--outttttttttttttttt. This has the effect of rapidly decreasing the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, which in turn lowers your stress level very quickly. You've probably seen children (think of a toddler who just skinned her knee, starts wailing, and is comforted by mom or dad), adults, and even dogs do this spontaneously. It works, really well. Try it!

Sources:

• Dr. Andrew Huberman: The Physiological Sigh [YouTube]

• Ramirez, The Integrative Role of the Sigh in Psychology, Physiology, Pathology, and Neurobiology, Prog Brain Res. 2014; 209: 91–129.

• Stanford School of Medicine, How Stress Effects your Brain and how to Reverse It, https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/10/07/how-stress-affects-your-brain-and-how-to-reverse-it/.

Week 7 incentive targets

By 10pm on June 23, complete 51% of Barbri or 48% of Themis AND 927 questions in Adaptibar or QBank.