Bar exam essays are different from law school essay exams. When you prepare to write bar exam essays, keep in mind that the bar exam graders are scrutinizing your papers for signs that you know the black letter law and can apply it in a logical way, reasoning from law to conclusions.
This is different from what many law school professors give credit for under the rubric of "issue spotting." The bar exam graders are practitioners. They want to see whether the bar candidate can analyze a fact pattern the way a practitioner does, stating the law and applying the law to the facts. Unlike some law students, practitioners do not write down every stray thought or idea, as though they were taking a Rorschach test. That kind of shotgun "issue spotting" will get you no credit on the bar exam.
Study for the bar exam with the aim of getting the most important rules of law into your mental inventory and learning to use them. Memorize the most important rules. Make up hypos that apply those rules. Figure out what decisions a practitioner must make in applying those rules of law. Those decisions are "issues."
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