When responding to bar exam essays on test day, you need to make sure that you manage your time so that you can respond to each essay as completely as possible.
In this post, I will outline a simple approach to ensure you achieve the maximum points possible on your essays in the amount of time you have to respond to them.
This post will not tell you how to approach each individual essay, but will tell you how to respond to each group of essays you must confront.
Bar Exam Essay Section
On the bar exam, you will be required to respond to a group of essays during a predetermined period of time. For example, you may be assigned three essays to write during a 90-minute block of time (or, if you are in California, a three-hour block of time).
The best way to approach these essays is to answer them in order of your competence with each topic, rather than automatically answering them in the order in which they are assigned.
Now, even though you should have studied all possible topics, it is typical for most people to have some subjects in which they are stronger and others in which they are weaker.
When responding to bar exam essays, I recommend you respond to the essay you feel most confident about, then the next most confident, and finally the least confident.
By doing this, your first essay will be quite good. This will give you confidence moving forward.
When you start your second essay, the confidence you felt during the first one will carry over.
By the time you start your third essay, you will have written two good responses. Your confidence in those responses will help you write a better essay answer than if you had started with the weakest topic first.
Example
I’ll use my experience with the California bar exam as an example.
When I took the bar exam, the second essay section had essays with the following topics:
- Trusts/Wills
- Community Property
- Corporations/Professional Responsibility
Now, if I were to order them just based on the general topic, I would have responded to Corporations/Professional Responsibility first, Trusts/Wills second, and Community Property third.
But, you should not decide just based on the topic.
Be sure to analyze the call of the question and skim the fact pattern to see how complicated your response will be. Maybe the general topic is a weak one, but the specific area being tested in a strong-suit.
So, in the example above, the Trusts/Wills question was about formation and revocation of a trust and whether a valid will had been formed. These were topics I was pretty good at.
The Corporations/PR question seemed extremely complex, and did not seem like something I wanted to attack first.
And, the Community Property question was awful, as I had suspected.
So, I reordered my response and answered the Trusts/Wills question first, Corporations/PR second, and Community Property last.
Conclusion
If you think this might be helpful to you, be sure to practice it. Have a friend or study buddy select three non-overlapping essay questions for you to work with.
Then, put aside the normal time to respond to the questions, and go for it.
Just make sure that you do not spend more than the maximum amount of time on each essay (e.g., if you have to write three essays in 90 minutes, do not spend more than 30 minutes on a single response).
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If you would like more help with writing bar exam essays, be sure to get my book, How to Write Bar Exam Essays: Strategies and Tactics to Help You Pass the Bar Exam, available on Amazon, BN, Audible and iTunes.
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