Prep Like A Pro: How To Avoid The Bar Exam’s Biggest Pitfalls

The bar exam: it’s perhaps the biggest rite of passage for anyone entering the legal profession. Not surprisingly, it usually comes with a fair amount of stress and uncertainty. Choosing your bar exam course shouldn’t add to it.

At JD Advising, we understand that the bar prep course you choose can seriously impact your entire bar exam experience. That’s why we’re here to address the biggest bar prep concerns we hear from our students year after year. If you can avoid these pitfalls, you’ll have the confidence and skills you need to pass the bar exam.

Without further ado, here are students’ top three bar prep concerns and how JD Advising addresses each of them.

1. How will I have time to learn everything for the bar exam? 

One of the reasons the bar exam is so stressful is that it covers many topics.  But, it only tests a few of them in any given year. Fortunately, you don’t need to know everything in order to pass. What you need to know is what’s actually tested. 

Here are a few key points to keep in mind: 

• We show students which topics are highly tested. While the exam topics may seem completely unpredictable, they’re not entirely random. JD Advising has invested significant time in determining which topics are most frequently covered on the bar exam. And while our outlines cover every topic that is fair game for the exam, we point students toward the topics that bar exam testers tend to focus on more than others. 
• Our outlines clearly show you when topics are tested. Other popular bar courses don’t delineate between tested and non-tested topics. JD Advising’s outlines are different. When you look at a subject like evidence, you won’t just see all the pertinent topics, you’ll also see what’s highly tested and what’s not. For example, you might see that relevancy and hearsay were tested on several of the most recent bar exams, while there hasn’t been a question about authentication in 20 years. These stats are updated in our outlines every new administration of the exam and presented visually, so you can plan your studying around what’s tested most often.
• Our outlines are visually appealing. Most law students tend to be visual learners, which is why we’ve made our outlines colorful and full of charts and other tools designed to help your retention. 

If your outline doesn’t present information the way you like to learn it, it won’t be effective, no matter how much black letter law is crammed into it.

Besides great outlines, you need great practice questions. JD Advising uses practice questions released by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. These officially released questions are the best questions to prepare you for the bar exam. JD Advising includes practice questions in an easy-to-use, online Qbank. This allows you to customize your practice exams so you can review the subjects you need to review. 

A screenshot of our multiple-choice question study aid builder is below. 

JD Advising is an all-inclusive course that comes with all the lectures, outlines, and practice questions you need to maximize your chances of passing the bar exam. There is no need to buy any supplemental resources as with some other bar prep courses. We also give you schedules and to-do lists to break everything down into manageable pieces. 

Simply put, when you focus on what’s tested most, you have the highest chance of success.

2. How do I know that I will pass the bar exam? 

No course can guarantee that you’ll pass the bar exam – if they do, you should find a different course. What we can promise, though, is that we’ll give you the best possible tools to do it.

• JD Advising has a very high pass rate, including an 82.1% pass rate for first-time takers. Our high pass rate is one of the reasons that law schools and law firms across the nation partner with us. This includes Ivy League law schools and Am Law 200 law firms. 
• Our course is taught by expert, full-time bar exam instructors who know the exam inside and out. We include Q&A sessions with instructors, a discussion forum where you can pose questions, and individualized essay feedback from a single attorney essay grader throughout the course. JD Advising’s prep course is tailored to what’s actually tested and we teach you how to study based on that.
• We offer options tailored to you. In addition to our standard course, we also offer a more personalized course that includes status check-ins, extra essay-grading, the ability to ask questions to our instructors and attorney experts at any time. Many students find the extra interaction and individualized feedback to be important for knowing they’re on track.

Regardless of your budget, though, our courses are designed to put you in the best possible position to pass the bar exam if you commit to preparing for it. Your success is our success.

3. What’s the #1 biggest mistake that first-time bar exam takers make? 

There’s no reason you would know how to prepare for and pass the bar exam going in – it’s not something that law school teaches you. Every year students make a number of common mistakes that are easy to avoid. That’s where we come in.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made during bar exam prep and how JD Advising helps you avoid them:

• Using course-invented exam questions rather than questions from previous exams – We always provide you with previously released questions that have actually appeared on prior exams. 
• Ignoring practice essays in favor of multiple-choice questions because you think you mastered essays in law school – We teach you that bar exam essays and law school essays are two very different things, and train you to write answers that will be scored highly by exam graders.
• Only starting to memorize at the end and getting overwhelmed – We teach you how to start memorizing from day one, telling you exactly what to memorize and including it in your weekly schedule, making bar prep far more manageable. What you memorized in week one will still be with you in week five.
• Lacking confidence going into the exam because you couldn’t adequately evaluate your own work – We give you comprehensive instructions for self-grading your work as you go, giving you an extra layer of confidence that makes you feel mentally ready for the exam.
• Not doing enough practice questions and essays to master your timing – When we assign essays and performance tests, we spread them out throughout your bar prep cycle so you become comfortable with them and don’t run out of time on exam day.
• Focusing on the quantity of practice questions rather than quality – We give you previously released questions and the ability to evaluate your performance on them, so you know you’re on track to pass. You’re not just checking boxes and doing thousands of practice questions in a vacuum.

Peace of mind and bar exam prep may seem to be contradictory concepts, but our mission at JD Advising is to make them go hand-in-hand. We’ve created a new model of bar prep that  gives you the confidence you need to pass the bar exam and also helps you avoid the common pitfalls along the way. Contact us today to learn more.