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So now you know from part 1 of this post series that the Be A Goat study plan is firmly rooted in the precept that you must take a lot of practice exams to be well prepared for the bar exam. If you’re anything like me, you groan at the despicable thought of writing essays day in and day out. I won’t deny it - it’s the advice no one wants to hear. No one wants to write essays. Reading outlines is so much more preferable. Why? Because it’s easy. Someone else had to do the hard work of getting that knowledge in their brain and creating the outline. Reading outlines is passive. It doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t show you where you are messing up or what you don’t know. Writing essays, taking a PT, doing MBEs – this is stuff that no one can do for you. It sucks. It’s hard (at first). It takes more effort and requires active engagement. But it’s also what you have to do on the bar. Do the hard work now, and it will pay off big time.
If you do the work, you will find that you won’t have to spend as many hours preparing as those other students. Those other students are the ones who pay thousands of dollars for a commercial bar prep class, and who spend most of their time listening to lectures. They read outlines. They make outlines. They make checklists. They make flashcards. They re-read the outlines and checklists. They quiz themselves on the flashcards. These tasks become a massive portion of their preparation. Consider the simple fact that they are going to be in a class for hours each day…. add in the commute to and from class, the lunch break, the commute to the library. Take note: they HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED STUDYING YET!!!!! That’s at least 5 hours of their day, and they haven’t yet performed a single task that they will be asked to perform on the actual exam. But not you! You are too smart for that. You’re not going to spend hours each day in class. You’re not wasting your time doing busy work that doesn’t prepare you for the bar exam, such as reading outlines. Instead, you are going to be practicing actual bar exam tasks by taking practice essays, PTs, and MBEs. Because of this, you will actually find that you learn the law SO MUCH FASTER! You learn the law faster this way because if you make yourself struggle through writing a contracts essay, for example, and don’t know how to do an offer and acceptance analysis yet, you are going to learn real fast! It’s hard to push through material like that. Your brain works hard. You find out really quickly that you don’t know it. When you finally read that rule of law afterwards, it gets cemented into your brain because you were searching so hard for it before. Now you will know the rule, and if you don’t get it down the first time, it only takes a few more and you have it. Let’s say you had been reading an outline instead of doing a practice essay. Would you have tested yourself to see if you could actually recite the rule of law, out loud, before you read it? Let’s say you had tested yourself and found out you couldn’t articulate the rule. It’s not a big deal, is it? You can just read the rule a second later. But it’s not the same when your entire essay is riding on this key issue. If you can’t put the rule of law down on paper and then properly analyze the facts, your whole essay is shit. You may only get 45 points on the essay, which would make it extremely hard to pass the bar exam. This type of pressure isn’t present when you are just reading through an outline. That is why you will never learn as much by reading outlines as you will by testing yourself. And that is why doing practice essays will work much, much faster than rote memorization. Make sure to check out the final post in this 3-part series here. {Did you find this post helpful? It came straight out of my book, The Goat’s Guide: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Preparing for the California Bar Exam on Your Own}
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