Howdy, preppers! This week, I want to talk about my favorite part of the bar exam: the MPT.

The MPT

The MPT is my favorite part of the bar exam. Why? Because you don't have to know any law to do well on it! But you do have to do two things: (1) master the most common tasks and (2) practice, practice, practice.

The most common MPT tasks

Every MPT asks you to complete one of several tasks (or formats or genres). The most common tasks are objective memo, persuasive brief, objective letter, and persuasive letter. There are other, less common tasks, but odds are the two MPTs on the exam will include at least one and probably two of these four. Practice these four tasks until you have the format nailed; e.g., if the MPT asks for a persuasive letter, you know what to do. Your bar-prep program will have examples of these tasks.

Practice, practice, practice & The Murphy Method

The MPT is a skills test. Practice is the only way to ensure that you possess the necessary skills. Practice will also allow you to develop and hone a methodology that will work for you on any kind of MPT task. How much practice? Keep practicing until you can complete the main "genres" (memo, brief, letter) in 90 minutes. Then keep occasionally practicing to keep the skill fresh.

I have my own method: The Murphy Method. Many of you have already studied my method. What follows is mostly for those who did not have me for LARW or PFTB and those who need a refresher.

Here's the link to a video that explains my method. I recorded this in February '21 for my LARW students when classes were canceled for the snopocalypse. It's long, so I broke it up into segments: 

00:00 Intro

01:25 Overview

01:50 What the MPT tests

07:28 MPT tasks & frequency

14:37 How the MPT is scored

17:19 Top 3 mistakes and how to avoid them

22:18 My MPT philosophy

24:08 Murphy Method: Tips

27:14 Murphy Method: Steps

1:01:14 In re Larson walkthru

The last section is a walkthrough of the In re Larson MPT. Here are the documents for that MPT and the slides from the video:
to

Murphy Method slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/...

In re Larson MPT packet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r9F1...

The half-baked answer I typed while creating this video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z...

My complete but imperfect answer to In re Larson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17...

And last but not least: Here is the link to the TAMU Law MPT bank: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uQDIk5EZaUB1smptjxeCJfSqW-NPffA2?usp=sharing. We have sample answers, "point sheets," and/or rubrics for all the MPTs in the bank. The bank also contains a spreadsheet that lists all the MPTs and identifies the genre (memo, brief, letter, etc.); make a copy of that sheet so you can keep track of your MPT progress.

Ultimately, you need to practice a method that works for you. Many preppers swear by my method, but if it's not your style, then maybe the method proposed by your prep company will help. Either way, practice, practice, practice so you have a plan for gameday.

Looking for extra MPTs for practice? Don't forget about our MPT bank!

As we enter week 3 of bar prep, it's time to start making your own flash cards. Here's the when, why, and how.

Commercial vs. home-made flashcards

Commercial flashcards (e.g., Critical Pass) can be very helpful for memorizing blackletter law. But they are spendy, generic (as opposed to customized for you) and tend to have way too much content on a single card. And the best time to use commercial flashcards is in the past. If you really wanted to get your money's worth out of, say, the Critical Pass Civ Pro cards, the optimal time to start using them was 2 years ago, when Civ Pro was still relatively fresh in your mind. Reviewing some quality commercial cards every couple of weeks would (theoretically) have maintained 80% of your hard-won knowledge. But that ship has sailed. If you don't already own commercial cards, the expense may not be worth it at this stage.

Now is the time for home-made flashcards instead. They have several advantages over commercial cards. First, they will be personalized to you; you'll make cards only for the rules you are struggling with. Second, a significant part of the value of flashcards comes from creating them; the effort you put into just creating a card will help your overtaxed brain remember what you put on the card. Third, you can control the amount of content on each card. Sometimes less is more. The super-dense Critical Pass cards can be difficult to memorize. On your self-made cards, you can divide rules into smaller chunks.

Paper vs. electronic flashcards

This comes down to personal preference--and maybe how legible your handwriting is (I can't read my own scrawl sometimes). Electronic flashcards are easy to create (maybe too easy; as noted above, the effort involved in creating cards can spur retention). And they are never further away than your phone (not necessarily a good thing; your phone is a Pandora's box of distractions, and I seldom have the discipline to limit myself to a learning app on my phone).

3x5 paper flashcards are tactile, which can aid concentration. And writing them requires some effort—which again can aid learning and retention. They are almost as portable as your phone and a lot less distracting. And grinding through a stack of tangible cards can be visually satisfying ("look how much of the stack I've mastered!"). So I lean in favor of paper cards.

If you opt for electronic cards, use a platform that has "spaced repetition" built into it. You want the cards you're struggling with to show up much more frequently than the cards you've mastered. Quizlet does not have any form of spaced repetition. Brainscape.com (free if you make your own cards) does. So does the flashcard feature on QBank. (Anki is another app that harnesses spaced repeititon, but it has a steep learning curve and I can't recommend it unless you already know how to use it.) Essentially, every time you look at a card, you tell Brainscape or QBank how well you knew the info on a scale of 1 to 5. The app then applies an algorithm to determine how soon you will see that card. Know it well? You won't see the card for a long time. Struggling with the content? You'll see the card again very soon. You can do the same thing with paper cards (as I explain below).

When to make flashcards

Multiple-Choice Questions

You're going to answer thousands of multiple-choice questions during bar prep. You'll get many of them wrong (that's ok! It's part of the learning process). You can't make flashcards for every question you miss; too many flashcards are as bad as none. So I suggest limiting MCQ flashcards to (1) those rules that you've never seen before--not in the lecture, not in the outline, not in law school--and (2) those rules that you have seen before--maybe multiple times in other questions--but they just aren't sticking.

Essay Questions

This is where flashcards are super helpful--because on the essays, you need to know the rules well enough to write a decent rule statement (as opposed to MCQs, where less than perfect knowledge may be enough to choose the right answer). For the essays, I suggest making a flashcard every time you attempt to answer an essay and have to look up the rule (or thought you knew the rule well enough only to have your hopes dashed by the sample answer). You'll do fewer essays than MCQs, so the number of cards will be manageable.

What to put on your flashcards

Easy. On one side, write the rule you're trying to learn. On the other side, write a question ("What are the elements of battery?") or just a simple cue ("Battery"). Keep it short. One rule per card. If an essay implicated several related but discrete rules, consider putting each rule on it's own card.

You should also put at least the general topic on the card (Torts, Civ Pro, whatever). I like to add what I call "breadcrumbs"--essentially, where to find the rule in the outline's table of contents. For example, the breadcrumbs for "dying declaration" might be Evidence>Hearsay>Exceptions>Declarant must be unavailable. That way, if I need to work on, say, hearsay exceptions, I can split those cards into a "focus" deck.

How to use your cards to maximize learning: Spaced repetition

Once you have a deck of cards, set aside time every day to grind through (some of) them. You might be able to get through all of your cards in 5 minutes at first. Later, plan to spend 10-20 minutes a day reviewing cards. You can break that up into smaller sessions. Carry some cards with you to fill up spare moments in your day, like when you're waiting for your coffee order at Summer Moon (you know, that time you would otherwise spend mindlessly scrolling through your media feeds).

How you review your cards is as important as making them in the first place. Here's what to do: As you go through your deck, sort the cards by how well you know them. If you know the material on a card 90% or better, it goes to the back of the deck; you've mastered that info and don't need to see the card anytime soon. Kind-of know what was on the card?  Put it somewhere in the middle--the better you knew it, the closer to the back; the less, the closer to the front. Stumped by a card--like, "I feel like I've never seen this before even though I made the card myself!"? That card goes about 3 cards deep into the deck so that it comes up again almost immediately, ideally within the same study session. And it keeps going back into that third-card slot until you start to learn the material, at which point it starts to drift further and further toward the back.

This process serves two goals: First, it harnesses the power of spaced repetition, an incredibly powerful learning technique. The idea is that you see material you are struggling with more often and material you have mastered less often. Second, when your deck is sorted by how ell you know the material, the cards you are struggling with are always on top! That way, every time you pull out your deck, the cards you need to review are the first ones you'll see (as opposed to grinding through a dozen cards you've already mastered). So even if you have just a few minutes to review cards (coffee shop?), those few minutes will be productive.

The bar exam is stressful. Prepping for the bar exam is stressful. Stress gets a lot of negative press these days. Chronically high levels of cortisol (the "stress hormone") are linked to a host of long-term physical- and mental-health problems.

But what if I told you that stress is essential to success? That stress can enhance learning, memory, and problem-solving? That without stress, there is no growth? That the old saw, "no pain, no gain!" has truth beyond the ken of gym bros?

Here's what science says: How you think about stress determines how stress affects your mind and body. Those who see stress as a tool for learning (learning whatever--Civ Pro rules, tennis backhands, whatever) learn faster and better than those who view stress as a debilitating condition to be avoided. This is called the "stress is empowering mindset." The first step to reaping the benefit of the stress-is-empowering mindset is to have someone explain to you that stress is beneficial, even essential, to your growth and learning. I'm telling you now! Instead of letting stress trigger a "threat response" in your mind and body ("Run away! Run away!"), develop a "challenge response"—the realization that you have the resources to handle the situation. 

The second step is to develop a narrative or story about a time in your past when stress was beneficial. The human brain is a story-telling machine; the world you perceive is at least in part the product of the story you tell yourself to explain what's happening around you and how you got here. In other words, the stories we tell ourselves profoundly affect our perceptions. If your brain tells itself a story about a time stress was beneficial, your brain will perceive stress as beneficial. When your brain perceives stress as beneficial, you can lean into the stress and benefit from it instead of running away from it and toward those taste-great-but-less-satisfying dopamine hits (like your phone) that distract you from your real goal. "If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth,” says Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford professor who researches the effects of stress on student learning.*

So take a few minutes to do this: Tell yourself a story about a time when stress helped you overcome an obstacle or achieve a goal. The story doesn't have to be about learning or school; it can be about anything. Describe how the stress was actually helpful, not hurtful. For maximum impact, tell the story to your significant other/parent/sibling/friend/child/dog or cat.

Stress is empowering, not destroying. Thanks to the wonderfully weird quirks of the human brain, if you believe it, it's true.

Sources:

Questions of the week

Q: On Adaptibar (or QBank), what topics should I have in my mix of questions?

A: You should be answering a mix of questions from (1) topics you studied in the last semester of law school and (2) topics Barbri or Themis has already covered. E.g., if you were in Preparing for the Bar Exam,  you should be answering questions on Torts, Contracts, and Evidence (because PFTB covered those) plus whatever BB/Th has covered to date. Keep adding topics as BB/Th covers them.

Q: What about essay topics--which ones should I have in the mix?

A: Same—Torts, Contracts, and Evidence, plus any other essay topics you studied last semester (Secured Transactions? Family Law?), plus whatever BB/Th has covered to date. 

Q: Will we have scratch paper on the exam? Space in margins? Some way of physically making notations to keep track of these stupidly long property questions? 

A: You will not have looseleaf scratch paper, but you may write in the margins/blank spaces of the test booklets.

Q: In Adaptibar (or QBank), what % correct should I be aiming for at this point in bar prep?

A: There are no % correct targets—yet. A week or two before exam day, I want to see at least 62.5% correct on 100-question simulated exams. Until then, your % correct might be in the 50s because you are learning the law by answering questions--and getting the answer wrong. That said, higher is always better, but if you're in the 50s, don't freak out. If you're in the 40s, we should talk; we might be able to improve your MCQ-answering skills.

Q: If Themis sends me to QBank to answer 34 questions, does that count toward my daily quota? What if I'm using Themis+Adaptibar?

A: Technically, yes, those questions count toward your daily quota. If you're using Adaptibar, answer the questions in Adaptibar instead of QBank.

Week 3 incentive targets

Here are the incentive-drawing targets for week 3: By 10pm on May 25, complete 17% of Barbri or 16% of Themis AND 305 questions in Adaptibar or QBank.

Many preppers are meeting the weekly incentive targets. If you're not one of them, do some extra work to get caught up! Make sure you're meeting your daily goals in Adaptibar and QBank. The number 1 rule of bar prep is: Don't get behind!