The bar exam season is here, and so students are asking me, "How many practice MBE questions should I do every day?" They expect me to give them a big number, like 33 or 50 or 100.
In fact, I take a totally different approach to the MBE. Numbers have nothing to do with it. My method for raising your score on the MBE is painful but effective, and it does not involve 33 or 50 or 100. I say that the way to raise your MBE score is to learn more law and learn to do patient legal analysis. That's right: learn more law, do better on the bar exam. What a concept! But learning more law is painful. Patiently applying the law to practice fact patterns, one element at a time, is slow and agonizing. And on many days, you won't feel the progress you are making.
By contrast, slogging through 33 or 50 questions all on the same day produces a feeling of acting tough, digging down, and studying like crazy for the bar exam. When you do 33 or 50 or 100 questions a day, in addition, you get tired. At the end of the day, you drop into bed feeling you have put in a hard day's work. And you really have worked hard. The issue is whether working so hard and doing all those MBE questions has actually raised your score on the bar exam. In many cases, alas, the answer is no.
Doing large numbers of MBE questions does not guarantee success on the bar exam. I meet too many bar exam re-takers who have done 33 or 50 questions a day, not just once, but before bar exam after bar exam, twice a year, for years, and they have still failed the bar exam, and kept on failing, repeatedly. Do they conclude that they made a mistake to do so many questions? No. That's because, to put it plainly, they have been brainwashed. These bar candidates have only been told one way to study, and the people who told them are loud and aggressive, and so when they do 33 or 50 questions a day, they think they have worked very hard. Just because they keep doing 33 or 50 questions a day and they are still failing the bar exam, they don't conclude that they've been misled and that doing 33 or 50 questions a day is an unproductive use of their limited study time. Facts have no influence on these bar candidates. They aren't searching for a better way to study. On the contrary. They think that if they did 33 or 50 or 100 questions a day, and they failed the bar exam anyway, it must be because they have not done ENOUGH questions.
If you don't want to be the MBE Victim who does huge numbers of practice MBE questions every day and who has no time left for studying, I recommend getting good at one area of MBE law at a time, starting with two of the most important areas on the bar exam, contract formation and negligence. Negligence is the topic with the largest numbers of questions on the Multistate Bar Exam. Contracts is key. In New York, Contracts/UCC, usually including formation, appears not just on the MBE but on 8 out of 10 New York essay exam.
So no, I am not going to give you a magic number of practice questions to drag yourself through every day. I do not think that 33 or 50 or 100 is a good number of questions. In fact, I think it will eat up your time, wear you out, and leave you not much closer to passing the bar exam. My suggestion is different. I say, master the law, do a limited number of practice questions on important topics. Then memorize the rules you didn't know. Then keep reviewing the rules you have memorized. Most important, and most painful, keep analyzing the fact patterns. Get really close to those fact patterns. Be patient, and dig down, to understand how the elements of the rules apply to the facts.
I'm saying that digging down and mastering the law and analyzing the MBE fact patterns is slow and painful and very productive, while being an MBE victim who slogs through 33 or 50 or 100 MBE questions a day will give you the illusion of studying while eating up all your time and not getting you much closer to passing the bar exam. Cal Newport makes a similar point in an excellent blog post he calls "Are you a Guitar Player or a Club Owner?" <http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/12/08/are-you-a-guitar-player-or-club-owner/>
I'll have more to say about memorizing those rules later on.
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Wishing you the greatest success on the bar exam,
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