Two-Thirds Finished

The Multistate Bar Exam (“MBE”) is comprised of two hundred multiple-choice questions. California administers the MBE as the second day of its three-day general bar exam. Today was that day for me.

For some people, the MBE is the hardest part of the test. Others have an easier time. Last week, while studying one morning at Starbucks, I ran into a former classmate who said the MBE was the easiest part of the California bar exam when he took it last summer. A few minutes ago someone else called me and said that when he took the bar exam, the MBE was maybe the toughest part. So it could go either way. My experience was more like the former classmate’s. Compared to writing three essays and a performance test, it seemed pretty easy to me. But I know everybody is different when it comes to multiple-choice questions.

There are two parts to the MBE. One hundred questions in a three-hour morning session, then one hundred questions in a three-hour afternoon session.

The Mood

Yesterday, things were tense at the test site. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Just about everybody was nervous. Today the mood was much lighter. People were laughing and talking and generally engaged in much more relaxed body language. Maybe that’s because we are more familiar with the process, but I heard other people pointing out that the nice thing about the MBE is that we don’t have to produce anything from memory. The answers are right there to be chosen. I think that had a lot to do with the mood. There may also be a good number of people like me, my former classmate, and my partner here with me, who feel that the MBE is the least stressful part of the bar exam.

The Warning

When we started the morning session, the lady up front who reads the instructions and “general instructions” began with a stern warning that we are not to discuss or disclose, in whole in part, in writing or orally, any content from the MBE. I am cynical. I suspect this warning must be how the National Committee of Bar Examiners keeps from having to write all new questions for each administration of the test. In the past, bar review companies would pay people to attend administrations of the MBE and memorize the questions, to be reproduced later and used to help their customer students practice. Then there was a lawsuit. Now there’s a warning. And the front of the test booklet has a statement to the effect that by breaking the seal on the book you are certifying that you are not taking the exam for any reason other than to gain admittance to the bar in the jurisdiction where you are sitting for the exam.

So I will not be talking about any of the questions here. Not that I could if I wanted to. It’s hard to remember any specific content from any of two hundred multiple choice questions.

The Test

If you properly prepare, the MBE is not too bad. I did about 2,500 practice questions. (The former classmate I met at Starbucks had done 7,000, which seems like overkill to me.) Both BAR/BRI and MicroMash provide explanations for all of the answers to their practice questions, so every time I missed a question, I wrote down in a notebook whatever I should have known to get the correct answer. That resulted in about 140 pages of handwritten notes. From those, I made flash cards of the more difficult rules.

My system seemed to work pretty well. There were not that many questions today where I honestly did not know the applicable rule of law. Maybe four or five. For most of the questions, I felt pretty confident in my answers. I was less sure about may be ten or twenty percent of them, but for all of those I was able to narrow the four available choices to two possible choices, which is a good place to be. My system might not work for everybody, but whatever you do, have a system.

Unique Things about the MBE

When you go to the MBE, you don’t take your computer. It’s just an ordinary standardized test. They give you a booklet and a machine-readable answer sheet. You use a pencil and you fill in bubbles. If you finish early—and a lot of people do—you can leave early. Technically, you can leave the exam room early on the first and third days, but you are not allowed to take your computer until the session ends, so you are still pretty much bound to the time schedule.

Today I finished the morning session about twenty minutes early and the afternoon session about fifty minutes early. My partner also finished early, so we left the exam site early. If you want to get out early, you need to finish before they call the five minute warning. Once there are only five minutes left, nobody is allowed to leave. Then, after time is called, you have to sit there while all the tests are collected, which takes about twenty minutes and is a major drag. So if you finish twenty minutes before time is called, you are really getting away from the exam site about forty minutes before the people who took the entire time. In our opinion, that is a major benefit of finishing quickly, not least because it gives you a longer lunch break. We were able to come back to our hotel, use the bathroom in our room, go down to the hotel restaurant, and have delicious pizzas for lunch. It was much more relaxing than yesterday’s mad-dash to Taco Bell.

Nevertheless, if you are taking the MBE, do not try to work faster than your natural pace. If you need the whole time, then take the whole time. During our practice tests, my partner and I both were consistently able to finish 100 questions in two and a half hours, so we were able to finish early without rushing our natural pace. That’s another reason to do a lot of practice questions and to do them in timed sets that approximate the real thing. It helps to know what you can handle, or whether you need to work on improving your speed.

Miscellany

There really isn’t much more to say about the MBE.

But if you are taking the bar exam in a location like the San Mateo Expo Center, where there are perhaps more than a thousand applicants in a single huge room, I recommend getting up and going to the bathroom or to get water at least once, even if you think you don’t need to. On your way back to your seat, look out across the crowd. It’s pretty weird. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen more people in one place making less noise.

The other weird thing to experience is the effect of the rule that communication between test-takers is prohibited during the session. In a large location like this one, there are enough people that, at any given moment, at least a few are up to use the bathroom or drink water, so there is pretty constant traffic. But nobody wants to break the rules. So far I have gotten up to use the bathroom twice. Both times, I felt almost like a ghost. There are people everywhere, but none of them look at you because none of them want to be perceived as communicating. And you don’t look at them. Everybody just drifts around, looking at the floor, staring into space, whatever. It almost feels forbidden to just look up and across the crowd of people working at their tables. I could only manage to look for a couple seconds each time before I felt this weird, invisible compulsion to look back down at the floor.

While waiting to go inside for the afternoon session today, we talked to a couple other people from SJCL—so far as we know, there are only five of us at this location—and observed that the “security” of the bar exam is pretty easy to enforce because every single applicant has enormous amounts of time, money, education, and expectation invested in this exam. I don’t think I have ever witnessed or participated in another social setting where the alignment of interests among all the constituents is so stringent that none of them are screwing around. Nobody wants to get one of those “Rule XII violation notices” that they keep telling us about.

Everybody is polite and courteous. Nobody is really complaining, except to make some quiet remarks that the repetitive instructions make us feel like grade schoolers sometimes. When proctors tell people to do something, they do it. Yesterday the proctor for my group told us to turn in our materials in a way that contradicted the instructions. Several of us said something like, “Oh, I thought we were supposed to do it differently,” but everybody did what the proctor said.

Don’t be confused about this point though. Most of the proctors are not being “strict” or harsh. There is one lady who seems to be a lot more high strung than the other proctors. Maybe she is in charge. But she certainly doesn’t seem to be striking fear into anyone’s heart. The requirements for admission to the State Bar of California are quite enough, thank you very much.

It makes me think about society in general. Whenever you get into your car and drive on public roads, you are facing potential consequences every bit as grave and life-altering as failing the bar exam, if not more so. There should be a similar alignment of interests creating this high level of cooperation and courtesy. But there isn’t. Drive anywhere and you’ll see that an astonishing number of people are complete jackasses, flagrantly violating multiple rules. Those violations make driving dangerous, increase the likelihood of death or serious injuries, and everyone would benefit if everyone recognized their shared interest in safety. But they don’t.

Anyway, it’s just something to think about until tomorrow, when I’ll probably write about what it’s like to finish the dreaded California bar exam.