I wrote this blog back in October of 2024. I’m sharing it in now in honor of bar results being released tomorrow. Best of luck to everyone! 

Here we are, a month away from California bar scores being released. If you’re like me, you’re still having at least one nightmare every week. My personal favorite is the one where the test involves multiple-choice questions with over fifty possible answer choices. The letter choices start repeating themselves (z), (aa), (bb), etc., and the scantron looks like a property textbook complete with a table of contents. Opening the question packet, I read the first question: “What case will the Supreme Court strike down next? Remember there is only one right answer, and it is the best answer.” I breathe a sigh of relief. Easy! I scour the fifty-odd answer choices and select (jj) Plyler. Thank you, Matt Coles. 

Next question. “What is your mother’s birthday.” I break into a cold sweat and utter words not fit to publish on this blog. It’s definitely a month that begins with M, but is it May or March? Or maybe it’s SepteMber? Curse my overly casual family who never put any emphasis on holidays or family events! Process of elimination won’t help either; every day in March, May and September are possible answer choices. I close my eyes and bring my hands together to say a silent prayer. Saying “Amen,” I drop my hand down and allow it to land at random on an answer choice. God, or gravity (we’ll never know) has selected: (dd) “03/30.” I shake my head incredulously. That can’t be right! I cross off (dd) and then repeat my prayer-into-wild-guess process. (A process I honed meticulously during bar study.) This time I’ve selected answer choice (cc) “03/31.” I shrug and flip through the scantron book until I find Question 2 answer choice (cc) and color in the bubble. For some reason I only have a highlighter, so all I do is color the bubble a translucent shade of hot pink. They’ll be able to read that, right? 

I turn to question three: “2 + 2 = ?” I fight back tears as I stare helplessly at the endless answer choices. Resigned to my fate, I close the materials and get up to leave the exam. As I’m walking toward the proctor with my materials my subconscious kicks in and I begin to wake as I try to tell my dream-self the answer. Fighting for control over my dream I wake with a start yelling, “The answer is 3!” The relief of realizing that the bar nightmare is just a dream is the deepest sweetest relief I have ever felt. I have another dream where I fall off a cliff towards my death. The relief I feel when I wake from that dream pales in comparison to the relief I feel when I wake from my bar nightmare. 

So now that I’ve overshared, let’s get down to business. All this stress about the bar has made me reflect on what I will do differently if I fail. I’ve come up with three things: (1) study smarter, not harder, (2) start earlier or front load, and (3) focus on form over substance. 

• Study smarter, not harder

Getting information from short-term memory to long-term memory requires recall, and not all opportunities for recall are created equally. I can’t tell you how many times I read a multiple-choice question and nearly tore out my hair knowing I had done one similar but still couldn’t remember the rule. If I have to study for the bar again, every time I get a multiple-choice question wrong, I’m going to quickly copy and paste the relevant rule from the answer and force myself to review it the next day. I thought about doing this more consistently while studying for the exam but it always seemed like so much extra work. Realistically, it would be about 30 minutes of extra work a day, which is not an inviting prospect during bar study, but I know it would make my studying so much more effective by ensuring I get enough opportunities to recall and cement the rule into long-term memory. Also, the opportunity to recall the information after having spent some time with it the day before would be more effective than seeing the rule a month later when I’ve already long forgotten the first multiple-choice question. 

• Start earlier or front load

Everyone tells you that your chances of passing are very high if you do 100% of your bar prep course. Nobody tells you that in your last week, you’re really going to want to be doing memorization, mapping out essays, and, most importantly, taking it easy. So, if you leave a lot of the bar prep course to the last week, you’ll have to choose between the two and you likely won’t be taking it easy. This might be fine, but if you’re like me and want the reassurance of finishing the bar prep course and also time to do your own directed study, then plan to finish your bar prep course early. I burnt myself out five days before the exam. This is another reason to front-load or start earlier. So, if I have to retake the bar exam, I want to make sure I can take it easy the week before the exam: only do 6-hour workdays and maybe even take the last two days off. 

• Focus on form over substance

You hear it again and again while studying for the bar: you can’t know everything. I didn’t realize how true this was until it was the last week and I realized how little I knew. Anecdotally, it seems like almost every bar exam involves one novel essay question that your bar prep course did not cover. (If you took the July 2024 exam you know exactly which essay question I’m talking about.) So, because you can’t know everything, I intend to focus on form over substance and learn how to pretend to know what I’m talking about. 

Studying for the bar was incredibly stressful, and the advice out there is all over the place. I know people who completed only 30% of their prep course and passed, and others who did nearly everything and still failed. It’s all a bit of a crap shoot. So if I do fail, the single most important thing I will do is refuse to feel bad about it. Because anyone with a shred of self-awareness who took the exam I took can only think, “there go I but for the grace of god.”