Bar Exam Resources and Links.

Ironically, I used Strategies and Tactics for MBE study both times. I totally heart it, not that it helped me all that much, obviously. I bought a copy this time around as well. I also bought a book called Mastering the Multistate Bar Exam. I have downloaded the MBE Annotated Preview 2006 for $26.00, and will probably do that over and over and over again. I still have the red and blue PMBR books and if I feel I need it, I may downloand Adaptibar, although I don't know too much about it. People seem to be really positive about it. I have downloaded and printed all resources on the California Bar website and I still have the Conviser outlines from Barbri and outlines of the new materials that a friend gave me.

Like The Grand Poobah, I was also offered a free account on BarEssays in exchange for a mention on this blog. I have been on there several times, and I must say, I like it. You can search by subject, by bar examination year, by score, and by format (meaning handwritten or typed). For example, if you want to look at Criminal Procedure essays and answers that scored over 65 from the July 2007 examination, you can get them, and compare them to ones that score below 57.5. That is a really useful tool, to be able to compare passing and failing answers on the same essay and I have yet to see this type of comparison offered anywhere else. For handwriters, it might be interesting to compare what constitutes a passing essay to what constitutes a passing typed essay because I bet they look very different. For those of us brilliant individuals who have inexplicably not passed the bar exam, the site offers $50-$65 for a set of essays from the bar exam. This site is a huge collection of essays and answers, and what better to learn from than what the graders actually looked at? I like that the question and the answer links are right next to each other - makes for easy printing.

The price for this site is $75 and the subscription will expire at the conclusion of the next bar examination. This is a lot of bang for your buck. For some reason, I never really had any faith in the answers that Barbri provided; you never knew whether that person passed or not, or what score they received on that particular essay. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't know of any other site or book where you can review a question as well as its passing answer and know the score that the examiners gave. When I think of the thousands of dollars I have spent in the past on materials that essentially proved useless to me, I wish this site had been around awhile ago. It's worth checking out.

www.baressays.com