Speaker 1: Bar prep can be overwhelming for a number of reasons, but one of my biggest struggles was to figure out what resources to actually use, especially when you have a sea of material to pick from. That's why in today's video I wanted to break down each of the resources that I used for every single portion of the exam. I'll be breaking down this video in three parts. The first is the essay, the second is the multiple choice, and then finally the performance test. Now the first topic I wanted to discuss was the essay portion and the resources I used for this. One of the best resources I used to study for the essay portion was actually going to my state bar's website and taking the past exams, reading through all those exams and seeing what the patterns were like. So I want to take you through exactly what I did and I'll show you on the bar website of how to navigate through here. And so you want to go to search and then I just literally type in past exams and then when you go to past exams you'll see here the very first link. If you're taking the California bar, you have literally essays from February 2023 all the way back to February 2012. So let's go down to February 2022, all of the essays, and this is exactly what you will get when you sit for the test too. Everything is exactly on point. So the more you familiarize yourself with the actual material, the more comfortable you'll be when you actually sit for the exam and seeing how the questions will look like. You can already see from the first five essays it says crim law and crim pro, community property, torts and remedies, cross, evidence PR, VA and remedies. The differences between the February bar and the July bar is that the February bar really has a lot of crossovers. It's not just a single single subject essay, so it's a tough exam. The February bar is always known as like the weird hairy bar exam because the bar examiners really like to throw a lot of curveballs. And already just from seeing the February 22 bar, you can notice that there are a lot of crossovers. And essay three, like that's pretty tough, like torts, remedies and even like three, four and five are all crossovers. So you have the first question and then you have literally the selected answers. And the selected answers, as a pro tip, the selected answers are literally the essays that the bar examiners chose to be the model answer. Meaning that each of these answers scored like I think like 80 and above and just a passing score is 65. So these are the model answers that you kind of want to read and see what patterns they're taking so that way you can put into your own essay template. So you can see here already that question one here is like selected answer A and then you have like the example of how they they you know kind of organized and wanted to explain their answer choice. So we're down to question four and if I'm not mistaken this is the evidence and PR cross. If you want to save some paper then I would say all you have to really do is just download the actual questions and then read through the actual essay answers just on your laptop or on your iPad or or electronically so you don't have to you know waste printer paper on like 15 pages or something like that. So I would literally download all the essays and then I would issue spot each of them and then I would read through all of the essay answer models. This way you can actually see what people are writing and see the style of what these essay graders are looking for. You can compare and contrast the issues that you spotted and see if that directly correlates with the essay models. Now depending on the state that you're in I don't know if they actually give you know model answers in every single state but the California Bar website is clutch because they give past model answers all the way from 2022 all the way back to 2012. Essentially you have 10 years you know past essays and model answers to read from. Another resource I used for the bar exam was my tutor's outlines that he actually gave me. So unfortunately my tutor does not offer his services anymore. He actually gave me every single outline for the California Bar subjects so whether it's you know California wills, trust, community property, BA and I believe it was California evidence. So he actually made his own outlines, gave me his own copyright to review but I cannot share that unfortunately. I plan on making my own outlines at some point so I'm hoping to share that with you guys in the future. Now another resource that I used for the essay portion for studying was actually magic sheets and you know I haven't even spoken to Brian Hahn. I believe he's the owner of this whole you know of magic sheets but I loved his materials and what I actually did was I used magic magic sheets plus my bar prep tutor's own outlines and I basically just made, I condensed both of those materials and made my own outline so that way I can understand and basically all I did because I haven't even studied, I haven't used his materials in like four years ago when I was studying for the bar exam but I literally just go into Google and I typed in magic sheets. It looks like a lot of information but it's everything that you need to know for the test. So he even makes some California distinctions and federal distinctions so I really loved his materials. You can see that his con law outline has is out of five pages. Essentially basically what I did was like I had mentioned before was I took my tutor's outlines and then I took these magic sheets and made my own outline and something that I can you know memorize and learn the rule statements from but I really use this only to kind of like prime my brain and understand the actual subject matter so it wasn't like I was you know typing out or trying to memorize every single rule but rather I would use the actual essay models given from the California State Bar Exam website and I use that to kind of make my own essay templates. Now as a pro tip if you're scared about a particular subject and a certain issue then you just need to punch fear in the face and say eff it imma do it and just attack. I remember that when I was taking the bar exam I was so afraid of getting First Amendment for con law and so what I did was I went to the the California Bar website and I took all the past exams where I can find every single time that constitutional law was being tested and I would literally read through a bunch of those essays and then create my own essay template. So this way that no matter what no matter how many times I was afraid to get this question I knew exactly how to attack that essay. Now probably the most important tip and resource that I used for the essay portion of the bar exam is my essay templates. It's basically kind of just like a notebook that's underneath the Microsoft suite series. This is literally the the notebook that I used when I studied in July 2019 bar exam. What I did was I made an essay tab, an MBE tab, a PT, and a schedule tab. Let me show you another example and this is for Crim Pro. I was also scared shitless to get Fourth Amendment criminal procedure and I ended up getting both constitutional law and Crim Pro Fourth Amendment on my actual bar exam. So this just shows you if you're over prepared you will be ready to go. I was scared for Fourth Amendment because I didn't know how to like exactly talk about it and I literally created my own outline here and how I would actually attack the test. I have the main rule, inclusionary rule, government action, standing, seizure, arrest of persons, and it goes all the way down to the warrant requirement, the exceptions to the warrant requirement. Like I said crazy about the essay portion but this was the best resource for me was just creating my own essay templates based off of the California Bar website using my tutor's outlines and then using the magic sheets. Now the second section is how I actually handled the multiple choice or the MBE. Now I kind of discussed this before but I used two main resources for studying for the MBE. I truly believe that the multiple choice section is all about volume and how many multiple choice questions you actually do so you can start seeing patterns. Now the two resources I used for the MBE portion are Adaptabar and Strategies and Tactics by Emanuel. Now for Adaptabar I really love this resource to actually see the analytics and how you can actually see how you're scoring on each and every single one of your questions and the answers right away. So versus you know kind of Strategies and Tactics or other materials but that are by paper is that you have to flip all the way towards the end of the book to see your answer choice and it you know just is tedious and can take a lot of time but this is why I love Adaptabar because as soon as you answer the question your answer will come up right away. Now another resource that I like to use I already just spoke about this in the previous section was I use Microsoft OneNote again and this time I used it for the MBE. So the thing about the MBE is that people yes it is all about volume but what I had to do was I was so terrible at the multiple choice portion that my tutor actually instructed me to make sure that I would go through each and every single answer that I got wrong and take the rule statement from the answer explanation and just put it into like a notebook. It would go to my MBE section so what I first did was I literally broke it out into each MBE. So you have CivPro, ConLaw, Contracts, CrimLaw, CrimPro, Evidence, Property, and Torts. The thing about the MBE is that MBE rule statements are really different from the actual essay rule statements. So as a pro tip you want to know that these rule statements are going to be separate from each other meaning that if you actually go through the MBE portion those rule statements are going to be a little bit different than how you would actually answer the essay portion. So as you can see here what I did on the multiple choice section was that once I answered an Adaptabar question and I got it wrong I would go to the answer explanation and see what the rule statement is and I would literally copy and paste it into my rule statements here. The multiple choice question is asking something about SMJ. I would literally copy and paste the rule statement that came from the answer choice and then just paste it into here. And so when I'm doing the MBEs I'm literally just going through each of the answers and this is why I like Adaptabar because I can just copy and paste fast. By the end of the session I would probably have you know I don't know like 20 rule statements or something. Sometimes what I would do for my third shift of the day when I was going through all my answers is I would literally read through all of my MBE rule sheets as a way of kind of like priming my brain and just seeing those rule statements so that way by the next day when I was doing my multiple choice section of studying I would like know the exact rule statement that I would have to look for when I was doing the multiple choice section. As much as I can get myself to have that muscle memory to keep typing and typing I was going to go that route. Now finally my last resource that I had mentioned before is using the strategies and tactics by Emmanuel. I love this resource so much because it's actually paperback and you know I there's still nothing like the feeling of highlighting and you know striking out questions. I would highly recommend investing into strategies and tactics because not only is it a good MBE resource but the answer explanations are amazing like really really clutch and on point. I would say that Emmanuel's answer explanations were much more thorough than the actual adaptive art answers. Strategies and tactics is on point. They give a long answer explanation and give you a real analysis on why you answered a question right or wrong. Now the third and final topic of how I studied for the bar exam is the performance test. Now the resource I used here was very similar to the essay portion and I actually just went to the California Bar website and downloaded all of the past performance tests, practiced all of those basically. But I'll show you exactly what how I use this but I also wanted to make a note that the performance test is really different from all other portions of the exam. This part of the test is very unique because it's a closed universe and you don't actually need any outside knowledge of the law in order to pass this portion of the test. Now as a pro tip if you don't know this already but the performance test is actually weighed as two essay portions of the exam so you want to make sure that you are nailing this part of the test because if you fail the performance test then you're probably likely going to fail the rest of the bar exam. So you have to take this part so seriously because it's really weighted as two essay. You just need to know how to get through all of the evidence that's given to you and know how to answer the call of the question. So for example the performance test is really probably the most real world like lawyer thing that you're going to do because this part of the test is going to ask you questions on you know can you write a memo for a senior partner or can you write you know a persuasive motion for a judge or can you write a letter for your client so it's going to ask you real world things and you're going to have to use the packet of evidence that's given to you and use that to answer the call of the question. I wanted to show you guys where on the California Bar website where you can find past exams for the performance test. So just as before you know you can go into the search type in past exams just like before you can also see here on the left hand side and you're going to scroll down past the examination questions. These are the essay portion questions 10 years and then here you're going to go to performance test and selected answers. So you're going to click that and here you go you have the one performance test and the selected answer. See in the file they have the memo, the transcript of the interview, they have the instructions if you want to read through this and this is your first time taking the bar exam. This is like your call of the question. This is the most important part of the performance test because this is exactly what they're asking for. So my approach here for the performance test was very similar to the essays. What I would do here is I would put a timer for 90 minutes and make sure I wasn't going over the 90 minutes because you really cannot afford to go over and borrow time from the performance test because it's going to hurt your other essays four and five because on the first day of the bar exam in the afternoon session that's when you have essays four five and the performance test for 90 minutes. So you really need to make sure that you are on time and on point and not borrowing time between the essays and the performance test. Now as a pro tip if you run out of you know let's say going through all the past 10 years, I guess that's 10 PTs in California, if you finish going through all 10 PTs then I would you know suggest going to a different state and going through their practice performance test and just see kind of it might be different. I think other states they have like a three hour PT or they give two 90 minute PTs. Those are perfect to practice for because yes they're not even though they're not California's performance tests they're very very similar. So now that you guys have seen how I studied for the bar exam for each of the portions and the resources I used, why don't you check out this video where I actually break down my detailed bar prep schedule from daily to monthly. And if you like my detailed bar prep schedule then feel free to email me because I can send you a PDF copy of my actual study schedule that I used. Now if you're liking this content so far then feel free to like and subscribe and stay tuned and hit that notification bell because I'll be dropping more content on the bar exam especially in the next coming weeks.