Human Memory and The Bar Exam

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You forget the names of streets two seconds after Google tells them to you. You can’t remember your grandmother’s birthday. And forget about ever finding where you put your keys. It’s not your fault. You have a puny little short-term memory.

Apologies — you don’t have a particularly puny short-term memory. All humans have limited short-term memories. Scientists across disciplines have proven how quickly our short-term memories get overwhelmed. Not being able to remember where you left your keys isn’t a failure of intellect; it’s the human condition. So, how in the world are you supposed to remember everything you need to know for the bar exam?

At Themis Bar Review, we’re obsessed with memory and learning because our only goal is helping law students remember the material necessary to pass the bar.

Good news: as an adult human, your long-term memory is awesome. There’s tons of stuff you couldn’t forget if you tried. You know the names of half the kids you went to elementary school with twenty years ago. How did that happen?

To get your third grade class into long-term memory they had to go through short-term memory. How did they get into the boundless infinity that is your long-term memory?

On the first day of school you learned the names of the kids sitting right beside you. After a couple of days you knew those names cold, so you moved on: the kid who had pudding cups at lunch, the kid who vomited, and the kid with the Star Wars lunchbox. Without thinking much about it, you concentrated on manageable segments of information, learned them, and then moved on to other segments. You’ve been doing this your whole life to compensate for your puny — sorry, normal — short-term memory.

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When we built Themis, we took lectures that were several hours long and split them into twenty-minute chapters — manageable chunks of information that your short-term memory can handle. Scientists call this segmenting, and there’s plenty of evidence that it’s a great way to learn efficiently.

Because you’re human, you also used at least one other effective tactic: you practiced retrieving those names out of memory. You didn’t just stare at a list of names, you actually saw the kid with the pudding cups and tried to get it out of memory. You stared at him and his pudding: “…Derrick?” He stared back: “Darryl.”

You practiced remembering, you missed, and you got some corrective feedback. That’s what scientists call retrieval practice, and we put that to work in Themis Bar Review as well. Each time you finish a twenty-minute video, you will be prompted to answer a series of quiz questions so you can practice remembering the material. And the next day when we present you with an MBE question covering the material, we’re asking you to practice remembering again.

We’re really proud of the pass rates our Themis methodology produces. Students who complete at least 75% of the Themis course pass the bar at a rate higher than the jurisdiction average. We’re proud because it means we’re helping students achieve their dreams. And we’re proud because we think about memory and the bar exam all the time; it’s good to know that our thinking is paying off.

We hope you’ll put your trust in Themis and let our methodology and thinking help you achieve your dream of becoming a licensed attorney.

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