You will find your bar exam course a very intensive experience. Most people will benefit from doing some preparation before the course starts. If you are still in law school, take advantage of any video tape review sessions your bar review course offers during your final semester. If you can get your books then, you might want to take them to the tape sessions to underline sentences in the book that might be good rule statements for the outlines you prepare later. However, you will benefit just from listening to the tapes and getting back into thinking about the subject matter.

Your bar review course will probably cover the multiple choice questions of the multi-state portions of the bar exam at the beginning of the course when you review substance. Your instructor may give you hints on how to take multiple choice exams and suggest that the best way to do well is to do as many questions as you can. Usually you will be given a large number of questions to test yourself after you have finished learning each substantive area of the law.

Only after the training in multiple choice questions finishes will you start thinking about essays. Then you will review issue spotting and answer formats and be given fact patterns so that you can test your essay writing skills.

I believe this approach means that you miss the reality that both multiple choice and essay questions require the same skills of issue spotting, knowing the rules, identifying the relevant facts and analysis. I have found that I do better on multiple choice questions if I first treat them as essay questions. I read the fact pattern, read the call of the questions without reading the choices, then I do the analysis of the question as if I were going to write the answer as an essay. Only after I have come to some conclusion about the analysis do I read the four answer choices. Then when I read the choices, the best answer often jumps out at me. Now I would be less than honest if I said this happened all the time. It doesn't. Some multiple choice questions will forever stump you. However, you have to keep in mind that you need not get them all right.

In both parts of your bar review course the emphasis probably will be on testing yourself as you learn. However, since it has been a long time since you have had your first year subjects, I believe it is important that a good portion of your preparation time should be devoted to training yourself. This means that you should know what law is involved before you try to answer a question. If you know that a question is about mutual assent then you can devote your energies to practicing the test taking skills.

Before your bar review course starts you can train yourself. You will need a book with multiple choice questions used in past bar exams in which the questions are indexed by topic. You should know a rule for the topic you are going to work on and the elements of the rule. However, you need know no detail or nuance. You can train yourself by doing the following:

1. Identify all the questions about one topic.
2. Read each question looking only at the call of the question.
3. Write the rule with the elements on a piece of scratch paper and write the words in the fact pattern that relate to each element beside it.
4. Come to a preliminary analysis of the fact pattern by determining which elements are clearly satisfied in the fact pattern and which element (if any) is at issue.
5. Now read the four choices and see if your analysis leads you to one choice. Then read the explanation in the book for the correct answer.
6. Continue until you have finished all the questions about the topic. You can use the explanations to flesh out your rule statements and elements into an outline.
7. Treat each question as if it were an essay question, and write out an answer.

This is a technique I use in seminars for third year students each year. Usually I try to do one seminar early in spring semester so that students can begin then to plan their study strategy. For many students this seminar is quite a wake-up call. They have taken few issue spotter exams since first year. Some have chosen to participate in internships or clinical programs, and others have taken seminar courses for which they wrote papers. Their skills in analyzing fact patterns and writing essays under timed conditions have been lost. In response to student concern, I have often organized regular practice sessions throughout the spring semester. These students start their bar review course way ahead. You can too.

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