Bar Exam Essay Advice

I recently received an email with the following question about preparing for bar exam essays:

As I get closer to the exam in February, I’m becoming more worried about being able to pass the essay portion. Any ideas?

Yes, I have some ideas.

But, first, I want to digress and discuss the need to fail in order to learn and master a skill.

Baby Mind

Think about how a baby learns to walk. The baby looks around for a few months and sees everyone standing on two legs. The baby decides to try it, and falls down.

Maybe even cries, maybe even gets hurt.

Does the baby give up? No, the baby keeps trying. Eventually, the baby can stand and walk, but is unsteady. After a few months, the baby confidently walks. By the time the child is three, it usually can walk and run very competently.

Imagine if the baby stopped trying to walk the first time it fell and landed hard on its butt. Lots of crawling adults.

Failure in Baby Steps

For me, learning to write bar exam essays well is reminiscent of how babies learn to walk. Although I could already write when I started studying for the bar exam (obviously), I had no experience writing “bar exam style” essays.

I was used to writing expansive essays for law school exams, filled with things besides law, like policy arguments or debating the relative societal benefit of the rules of law in different jurisdictions.

All that was out the window with the bar exam.

The jurisdiction where I first took a bar exam (Oregon) had a length limit for typed essays of 4,000 characters. That’s about one, single-spaced page. I thought, “How can I possibly fit a complete answer into such limited space?”

Adjusting to those restrictions was like learning an entirely new skill. I had to fail a lot before I gained rudimentary competence, and it took even more failures before I could consider myself “good” at it.

Learning

The process of learning to write bar exam essays well involves two major steps:

understanding the format of the essay response expected by bar graders, and
knowing enough black letter law to be able to draft a competent essay response.

These steps are not learned in any order, but are learned simultaneously.

The important thing to do is ensure that you are writing practice essays often as you begin to study for the bar exam.

Your initial essays will most likely be subpar. When you compare them to the model answer, you may be frustrated, depressed or even scared.

The important thing to do is to analyze what went wrong, pick yourself up, and try again.

Action Steps

So, let’s say you attended/watched a bar exam lecture about contract law today. At some point before the day is over, find a contract law essay question and write the best response you can. Even if you can only write for 10 minutes, just do it.

Then, grab the model answer and compare it with your practice essay.

If you are at the start of bar prep, the answer is likely to come up short on analysis and you will very likely have missed issues.

Don’t worry.

Instead, for all of the issues you failed to recognize, go back and re-read the fact pattern of the essay question to see how each issue was raised. Now, the next time you see similar facts, it is more likely you will spot the issue.

If you spotted an issue, but your analysis was incomplete or wrong, be sure to review what you should have done to get the analysis correct.

By repeating this process with every practice essay from the start of your bar exam prep, you will soon be a much better bar exam essay writer and be confident you can pass the essay portion of the bar exam.

Conclusion

The early stages of bar prep can be hard on your self-confidence. This is true with MBE prep as much as essay and performance test preparation.

The important thing is to believe in yourself, accept the little failures, learn from them, and keep moving forward.

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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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