Statute of Frogs

Yes, it’s true. I pretty well fell off the face of the planet for a couple months. Sorry about that. But I’m back now.

Since I was last here, I’ve found out that I passed both bar exams I sat for in July. So I’m now actually a lawyer.* Many of my friends and fellow bloggers have also passed. Belated congratulations to all. (A special congratulations to Beanie who passed on the third try. I’ve been reading the blog since before I started law school and I’m glad it’s all finally worked out.)

There will be more to come soon. Stay tuned.

* It should go without saying that, despite my newfound credentials, nothing here should be taken as legal advice. If you’re seeking legal advice from a not-particularly-serious blog (particularly one written by a very newly minted lawyer), you need more than legal advice.

Everyone who took PMBR, or who thought about it and didn’t, should read this. I guess there’s some truth to PMBR’s claim that its practice questions look most like the real MBE. I wonder if this is why this year’s MBE was such a bear.

Since lots of people are still coming here based on MBE searches, and since I didn’t have Internet last night, I’ll back up a little and talk about that briefly.

The first half seemed perfectly normal and as expected. At the break, my friends and I all felt well-prepared and unsurprised. And then the second half came. Full of very bizarre questions, including one that essentially asked me to talk about the relationship between two terms, neither of which I knew. I eliminated one option as being asinine and then looked around for a 3-sided coin. Failing to find one, I picked C. For Clueless.

OK. Now I’m going to do my best to forget everything specific about the exam. No more blogging about its particulars. Instead: frolic.

A ridiculously long three days, but it’s over now. First thing I did when I got home was hide all the BarBRI materials upstairs. That was about the limit of my competence at this point. I’m just hoping I can stay awake long enough to celebrate.
Tomorrow is devoted to being in a vegetative state. Saturday’s for packing. We leave first thing Sunday AM.

Congratulations to everyone who’s done.

One day down. And (at least I think) the hardest of them. Though these were not the topics I would have asked for (there was no Civ Pro and almost no Evidence), I think it went pretty well. They happened to pick tax and family issues that I actually knew. There was even a point of law from the list of things-I-habitually-screw-up that I’ve been carrying around for the last few weeks. I thought “That’s on my list” and, in fact, I remembered the relevant point of law. Now I can forget everything I learned about PA law.

It’s so much better to actually be taking the test than studying for it. But I’m really tired. I just hope I can hold my head upright on Thursday. Drooling on the exam papers wouldn’t do much to get the bar examiners on my side.

Good luck to all taking the MBE tomorrow!

I’ve never been a study-up-to-the-last-minute kind of student, so today is instead devoted to keeping myself from freaking out. I know enough law to pass; I just need to be in a sufficiently functional frame of mind to get it out on paper. Even if I wanted to study today, I’m too wired. Yesterday I found myself unable to sit still to watch television. So some calming is in order.

With that in mind, today has been spent doing really important things like making a playlist to get me to and from the various exam and hotel sites. I spent much of the morning chatting with friends who are fortunate enough not to be taking the bar exam at the moment. I went to our favorite lunch place. I went to the library to check out frivolous reading. And in a couple hours, I can start making dinner. Pretty much, it’s all about keeping myself distracted for the next 18 hours and change.

This post is of absolutely no use to those taking the bar this year, but it’s been on my mind.

Many people told me during law school not to take classes just because they were on the bar. Basically I think that’s sound advice. I didn’t take Fed Tax or Family Law and I have no regrets about that.

If, however, I hadn’t taken Evidence and, to a lesser extent, Crim Pro, that’d be a problem. So my advice: don’t take anything just ’cause it’s on the bar, except Evidence and some course that deals with the Fourth Amendment.

If I fail because I screw up a Family Law or Fed Tax question, I promise to return and modify this post.

These quotes pretty well sum up how I’m feeling right now. I’m midway through a final practice MBE. Then I’ve got 3 days of trying to get those things that have inadvertantly fallen out of my brain back in before they matter. It will all be over soon, thank God.

Someone got to my site yesterday googling for answers to the july 2006 mbe. If only.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve rapidly lost the ability to talk and/or think about anything not bar-related. This is, of course, a topic that is considerably less interesting to everyone I know (fellow bar-studiers excepted, of course) than it is to me. And it’s not really all that interesting to me anymore. The result is that my conversations with non-bar-studiers tend to be really short.

We went to dinner with a couple friends of ours last night, which was nice. I could have the standard 3-minute conversation on the bar exam that is my stock-in-trade at this point, and then I could watch while everyone else talked about other things. It was pleasantly diverting and I didn’t feel like I was dragging the conversation towards tediousness.

One of the lecturers in the simulated MBE review pointed out that people tend to miss multiple choice questions in bunches. He suggested that, when you sense that you’re losing focus, you stop for a moment to catch your breath and get mentally organized again.

Sound advice. I was doing a set of practice questions today and noticed that I wasn’t concentrating. I stopped, stretched for a moment, and reminded myself to pay attention. When I went back to score myself, I’d just gotten 3 wrong at that point and after I stopped, I got 5 of the next 6 right.

I’ve noticed that the number of questions I miss because I don’t know the law is going down. But I really have to get a handle on the questions I miss even though I know the law. I think I probably know enough law to pass at this point, but there’s not leeway to miss questions I know the answers to. That’s just dumb.

I’m studying for both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bar exams, which provides lots of opportunity for comparing the procedures in the two states (and generally leads to griping about New Jersey). Today’s rant: released essay questions and answers. When PA releases old essay questions, they release a detailed statement of the examiner (listing all the law that’s relevant complete with citations), a grading checklist (listing items that examinees are expected to discuss and the points allotted for each issue), and a sample passing student answer. I couldn’t ask for more. In New Jersey, by contrast, they release only a student answer. These answers are, of course, frequently incorrect about minor (and in some cases, major) points. So they’re pretty much useless for grading yourself (beyond making sure you spotted all the major issues). The only upside is realizing that the authors of all these answers passed the exam.

I’m amused to discover that a search for the tag “Bar Review” on Technorati produces 3 blogs: mine, California Bar Girl, and this guy, who’s clearly having more fun with his bar review than I am. Maybe I should be preparing for the bar exam by going to a couple of happy hours a week. It’s worth a shot.

I’ve started having bar exam related dreams. They’re not stressful time-is-running-out-and-I-haven’t-started-writing or I’m-at-the-exam-but-I’m-not-wearing-any-clothes dreams (though there’s still time), but I keep waking up sure that I was working on a bar exam question. Last night it was a sort of real property question in the form of a scavenger hunt. We had to go examine the property at issue in the question. So far as I know, that’s not part of my exam.

It’s bad enough that I’ve become incapable of talking about anything except the bar exam, but now it’s seeping into my non-waking like as well. At least it will be over soon.

Although I’m not at all sorry to have missed the BarBri-in-person experience, it does mean that I haven’t seen very much of my classmates the past 6 weeks. Now I’m back on campus at least a couple days a week, though, so I’m catching up with folks. I’m trying to focus my attention on my lower-stress friends, though. I’m pretty calm, all things considered, and I don’t want to disturb that. Still, it’s good to debrief with friends about what a strange experience bar prep is.

Home now, and then Employment Discrimination. My last new subject matter. Onward.