I scored a 332, but felt like I could have failed. First, I’ve passed two bar exams in the past, but it’s not the same test it was 15 years ago. I took a break from practicing law to raise kids and move a bunch, and bombed my barbri pretest.

I took barbri, and added extra MBE questions on top of their learning Qs and practice, because it works with my learning style, but had to listen to a bunch of lectures at 1.25 speed.

After the first set of videos and studying, got a 141 on the test that was halfway. I still managed to raise my score an additional 20 points from there with the barbri extra questions and only paid for the most recently released questions from the NCBE people.

I was really stressed about essays, but not MPT, although I had to practice a bit to get finished in time. I followed advice to type and write the first paragraph and the conclusion, then go back to add headings and appropriate advice/argument. That helped on MPT 2, because with that insanity, I would have never written a conclusion.

Civ pro- I wrote out a “life of a case” timeline complete with deadlines early on, and read through it a few times a week.

The last month, if I got a rule wrong in an MBE answer, I wrote it out. I didn’t make an extra outline, just hand wrote a 6-7 word rule on a piece of paper that I really didn’t go back to review.

I outlined tons of essay answers, but actually wrote out a minimum of 4 for every topic. I studied every essay topic, which paid off. Don’t follow predictions.

I felt that the questions were geared towards three areas; the rule, the exception to the rule and the exception to the exception. Being able to follow that track of thought helped me tremendously in categorizing important facts. NCBE loved putting in extra irrelevant facts, especially in crim law.

I studied in question sets of 10, unless I was practicing for exhaustion, and then it was groups of 50.

Someone here suggested answering the question yes/no before picking answers, and that helped me tremendously.

I felt that the test wasn’t really testing knowledge of law, but more the ability to not get distracted by nonsensical phrases or mixed up standards that sound right. Scintilla anyone? The test sucks. I shouldn’t have felt I could have failed based on tricks.