By: Meghan Short, Senior Managing Director, Helix Product and Customer Experience
As a Washington bar exam taker, you were ready to sit for the exam at the end of July, but now you have to wait until the beginning of September. How should you spend this extra time?
First, let’s acknowledge how stressful, disorienting, and disruptive this is. Putting off the exam for another month has many implications for your finances and your life. It’s understandable to need some time to breathe and regroup. When you’re ready, try to reframe this extra time as a bonus – time to solidify what you know and get a bit more practice.
After you get over the initial shock and figure out your life logistics, it’s a good idea to make a study plan for the next few weeks. First, evaluate how you spend your time. Some may be able to study full-time, but most law graduates don’t have those kinds of resources.
So, how many hours will you have to devote to studying each week? Keep in mind that you don’t want to go so hard that you burn out before the exam. You already put in the bulk of the work – this extra month is about maintaining your momentum and improving where you can.
So, with that goal in mind, what should you focus on now?
Largely, the next few weeks should look a lot like your last couple of weeks of bar study. Your focus should be on shoring up your memorization and seeing as many practice problems as you can.
Memorization
Set up a schedule that allows you to focus on small chunks of material at a time; think topics – not whole subjects. Plan out the rotation so you can come back to those topics two to three times over the next few weeks. The key is to remain active with your memorization. Don’t just re-read outlines or re-watch videos.
Passive tasks like these will give you a false sense of what you know because the rules will feel familiar, but you need to put in effort to fully commit them to memory. Instead, write things out, speak the rules out loud, and test yourself. Once you think you have a topic down, come back to it less frequently, but make sure to keep it in the memorization rotation so it stays fresh.
Practice
Meaningful practice is critical to your continued study plan. It helps you to memorize, it teaches you what facts trigger rules, and it helps you to think strategically about how the bar examiners might test different topics. On exam day, your goal is to have a strategic approach to each component of the exam that you can use no matter what facts are thrown at you. And practice will make this goal a reality.
At this stage, try to complete your practice under timed conditions and with closed notes. If you don’t know a rule that’s being tested in an integrated question set or on a multiple-choice question, that’s ok. Even with unexpected additional study time, it is impossible to know absolutely everything within the content scope of the exam (and you aren’t expected to). One of the skills you should continue to develop is knowing what to do if you don’t know a rule – to practice making something up based on your general understanding of the law, apply it, conclude, and then quickly move on to a question that you can knock out of the park. Practicing this skill will make sure you’re ready for anything on exam day.
Of course, practice is only useful if you take the time to assess your work and reflect on each practice session. So, after you’ve completed a set of practice questions, continue to critically review your work as compared to the sample answers – and read all the multiple-choice question answer explanations to be sure that you answered the questions correctly for the right reasons. Thoughtful review will also expose you to the nuances of how rules are applied, which you can’t learn just by reading (and re-reading) the outlines, along with how facts implicate these nuances.
Self-care
Don’t forget to continue to check in with yourself and where you are in your study process. After each practice session, reflect on what you learned about the doctrine, what you learned about your test-taking process, and what you learned about how the bar examiners test. Then, figure out action steps to help you improve during future practice.
And remember, you don’t have to give 100% every day for the next month. You were ready for this exam on test day. You just need to stay at that level. You know your strengths and weaknesses. You now have a bit of extra time to fortify those weaknesses while making sure to maintain those strengths. Before you know it, this will all be behind you and you’ll be stepping into your future as a licensed attorney.
You can do this. We believe in you.