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June 25, 2006
Reflections from the Bar/Bri midpoint
There are thirty days until the California bar exam.
When I speak to California attorneys about their experience with this exam, almost all have used the word “stamina.” It reads on this exam in two ways.
First, the exam itself a three-day siege. A certain amount of physical and mental endurance is necessary in order to avoid gibbering on day three.
Second and more importantly, exam prep (administered, for about 95% of law school grads, by Bar/Bri) itself is a challenge. 8–10 hours a day, 6–7 days a week, for just under two months. For me, for now, this is the more difficult stamina challenge.
It’s very difficult to feel any sense of accomplishment from bar study. One day pretty much blends into another, and benchmarks of progress are few and far between due to the very large number of subjects under analysis. The process can really start to grind. Last night, I ended up walking the streets at midnight, listening to Sigur Rós, in order to recover perspective. “What is the point?”
“You can’t learn everything” is repeated endlessly to applicants. But the expectation that you will try to learn everything is equally well-communicated. Our most recent practice tested us on exceptions to exceptions to rules—issues that have never appeared on a bar exam, but that do reflect settled law. Could it be tested? No one knows. Maybe, I guess. Maybe it will be tested, and I’ll get it wrong, and I will fail. Better make a flash card right now.
At dinner the other night, David said that the bar exam’s gotten harder just because there’s so much more law now than in the past. I guess that could be true but of course it doesn’t change the price of Bar/Bri books in China.
I have concluded that the only thing to do is to draw lines around each subject area, denoting the depth to which I am willing to study, and hold myself to those depths. Any deeper, and the cost/benefit of the dive no longer balances. I have a marriage to consider, and a move to the East Coast. Some of my classmates have infant children. Others are working full time jobs. For me, and for them, we just have to draw a line and rely on ourselves.
That’s inconsistent with the Bar/Bri mindset. Their paced study program recommends up to twelve hours’ study every day. That might help me pick up some extra points, but would turn me into a shell. To that extent, the Bar/Bri program is bad and unhelpful. It’s guidance, of a sort, but it’s not realistic or consistent with maintaining the stamina actually required.
So that’s where I am right now.
Posted by Rob Courtney at June 25, 2006 12:52 PM
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Comments
Sorry the Bar sucks, by the way. I'm sure you'll pass, but it'll be no fun getting there.
Posted by: drew at June 28, 2006 08:12 AM
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