Howdy, preppers! This week's topics: Nothing is sticking! (a.k.a. the bar-prep blues).

Nothing is sticking! And my scores in Adaptibar are dropping!

You've been studying hard for at least a few weeks now. You should be seeing obvious signs of dramatic improvement, right?

Wrong! If you're like most preppers, you feel like your overworked brain is retaining nothing. What you studied in the first week of prep seems to be gone. Your score in Adaptibar is sinking and taking your confidence down with it. 

You have a bad case of the bar exam blues. 

Don't fret. This is normal. You're not alone. And it will be ok.

Here's what's happening in your brain (in layman's terms, which is the only way I can understand it): Your brain has two memory banks: Short-term or working memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory can hold a limited amount of information. Long-term memory is (theoretically) infinite. The first half of bar prep quickly overwhelms your short-term memory. Your prep company has you drinking something new from the doctrinal firehose every day; there's no way to retain it all in your short-term memory. That's why cramming doesn't work on the bar exam the way it worked in law school.

So your brain starts moving info from short-term to long-term memory. This mostly happens while you sleep (which is one reason that a solid 8 hours of sack time every night is essential during bar prep). That's good, because your long-term memory has space for all the hearsay exceptions and the business-judgment rule and everything else you need to know.

But moving info to long-term storage creates another problem: Efficient retrieval. To answer a bar-exam question, your long-term memory has to send the appropriate rule to your short-term memory, where your brain can use it to answer the question.

So how do we make retrieval more efficient? By answering practice problems. Every time you attempt to answer a question and ask your long-term memory to serve up the relevant rule to your short-term memory, you reinforce the neural pathway that allows your brain to find and access that information. The more you recall (or attempt to recall) a particular rule, the stronger the pathway for that rule becomes. Practice questions are the best way to reinforce the pathways you need for exam day. Flashcards can help, too. 

Contextualizing is vital, too; a well-ordered "cognitive schema" ($5 phrase for "outline in your head") in your long-term memory will spit out the right rule much more efficiently than a disorganized mishmash of rules from different topics. How to contextualize? When you get an MCQ or essay wrong, don't just memorize the rule you didn't know (or couldn't remember). Crack open the shortest of your prep co's outlines and find where that rule appears in the outline in relation to everything else you need to know for that topic. Context matters.

So what about Adaptibar (or QBank)—why is my score dropping? It's a combination of two things: First, your brain is still working on the long-term/short-term connections described above. Second, Adaptibar identifies your weaknesses and forces you to work on those weaknesses by sending you more questions that its algorithm thinks you can't answer. That's why Adaptibar is worth what it costs. (If you're on QBank, you have to do this for yourself--but not yet). Answering MBE questions and getting them right gives you the warm fuzzies, but getting them wrong gives you something much more valuable: The opportunity to learn something you didn't know. It's a beatdown, for sure. It can be demoralizing. But working on your weaknesses is exactly what you need to do. So embrace the suck and have a growth mindset: Struggle is not a sign of failure; it's a sign of learning.

TL;DR: This too shall pass. But it's going to take a while. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Don't get discouraged. Don't let a bad session of practice questions ruin your day and stop you from moving forward. You can do this.

Coming next week in Themis: Practice Exams

Themis peeps: Next Monday, Themis will release the first two practice exams ("PEs")--a 45-question multiple-choice exam and a 3-question essay exam (topics: Contracts, Evidence Real Property, and Torts). You should attempt these under exam-time conditions (e.g., 1.5 hours for the MCQs, 1.5 hours for the essays, eliminate all distractions). If you're behind in Themis, get caught up this week so you will be ready for the PEs early next week. In next Monday's blog, I will explain how to use "focused practice" in Adaptibar/QBank to strengthen any weaknesses exposed by the PEs.

The mid-afternoon "blahs" are a normal part of our wake-sleep cycle. Nodding off in class is not simply the result of a carb-heavy lunch or a boring lecture. Our minds and bodies naturally go into a physical slump in the early to mid-afternoon. Submit to the feeling! A short nap between 2 and 4pm can leave you feeling refreshed--and enhance your short- and long-term learning. 

In one study, 84 students were divided into three groups. All three groups studied for four forty-minute blocks, with short breaks between the first/second and third/fourth blocks. But for an hour between the second and third block, one group continued to study, one group did whatever they wanted, and one group took a nap. The napping group significantly outperformed the other groups on tests performed at the end of the day and (more significantly for bar prep) on an exam eight days later. In other words, the napping group learned and retained more than even the group that continued to study for an extra hour!*

In another study, students were divided into napping and non-napping groups. Both groups performed equally well on cognitive tests before noon. But later in the afternoon, the non-napping group performed significantly worse than it had in the morning, while the napping group "did markedly better and actually improved their capacity to learn." "[F]act-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain's prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space.

'It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.'"**

Naps of 20 minutes or less appear to be ideal. Longer than that and we run the risk of two problems: The first is "sleep inertia"--the grogginess you feel after sleeping. The longer the nap, the longer and deeper the sleep inertia, to the point that the drawbacks of sleep inertia outweigh the benefits of napping. The second is that naps longer than 20 minutes can interfere with your nighttime sleep routine, which is even more important to learning and long-term memory. 

So give into the urge and take a short nap in the mid-afternoon. Your focus, attention, and memory will profit!

Sources:

*Cousins et al., The long-term memory benefits of a daytime nap compared to cramming, 42(1) Sleep (2019).

**https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/afternoon-nap-markedly-boosts-brains-learning-capacity (quoting Berkley sleep researcher Matthew Walker).

• Lau H, et al. Daytime napping: effects on human direct associative and relational memory. Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2010;93(4):554–560.

• Antonenko D, et al. Napping to renew learning capacity: enhanced encoding after stimulation of sleep slow oscillations. Eur J Neurosci. 2013;37(7):1142–1151. 

• Mazza S, et al. Relearn faster and retain longer: along with practice, sleep makes perfect. Psychol Sci. 2016:27(10): 1321–1330.

• Roni Rabin, Behavior: Napping Can Prime the Brain for Learning, New York Times Feb. 22, 2020.

Question of the Week

Q: I'm using Barbri, and I was in Preparing for the Bar-Live. Most or all of the MPTs Barbri will assign throughout the summer are the same MPTs we did in PFTB. Can we submit other MPTs to Barbri for grading?

A: Barbri and I like the same MPTs. There's always some overlap between the ones I assign and the ones Barbri assigns, but this summer, the overlap is 100%. I asked Barbri, and Barbri said they cannot grade any other MPTs. That's unfortunate. So let's do this: I will personally review answers and provide feedback to this MPT (Patel v. IBI) for any PFTB-Live x Barbri student who wants to submit it to me. You can email answers to me at john.murphy@tamu.edu. I suggest saving this MPT to complete as part of the Barbri simulated written exam in early July, when (ideally) you will complete two MPTS back-to-back.

Week 5 incentive targets

By 10pm on June 8, complete 34% of Barbri or 32% of Themis AND 595 questions in Adaptibar or QBank.