Practice Test

Today was the BarBri MBE practice test. A fun filled six hours of practice guessing, practice #2-ing circles, and practice holding in one's piss. In retrospect, not really that fun, except for the fact that it was merely practice and there is still a three weeks and a day until the real thing. Still seems a long ways a way. It felt closer at the end of May, before classes started and I was staring at a giant pile of books I would have to read multiple times in the next two months. Now, eh, plenty of time. I am considering taking the week off (other than class of course) to rest up for the two week surge of rudimentary understanding. I probably will not though. The last five days have consisted of (Wed.) me going to a concert in the city and getting shit-faced, (Thurs) actually studying (but skipped class), then going bowling and getting shitfaced, (Fri) going to a wedding (yeah, what the fuck right), and getting shit-faced and passing out at 9:30 missing the fireworks, and Sat. and Sun. were highly uneventful, involving listening to the Property I lecture that I missed and forcing myself to read the Property lecture notes. Yep, that is all I did on Saturday and Sunday.

But today was practice real thing. Because I am nerd, I graded my own test when I got home (actually, graded a.m. exam at lunch. Had to know you know). I am pretty happy with the results. Raw scored a 131. Should have been a 132 but I made a transcribing error on my answer sheet. They, whoever they are, say that your score goes up 20 points between practice and the actual thing so I am hopefully looking at a 150, which means I should have taken MI's bar.

But there were several shocking things I learned over the course of the Practice Test:

• I Was legitimately surprised at the number of of answers I knew were 100%. In that there were shockingly few of them. In law school, I only had one multiple choice test out of 5 or 6 where I was not positive I got at least 75% right. Here, it was maybe 20%, if that.
• What the fuck is up with intoxication questions? Shit, every other question has some jackass getting loaded. It seemed excessive. I wonder if the actual bar exam is similar. Needless to say, six hours of reading about defendants and tortfeasors getting plowed made me a little thirsty. This liquor store across the street appreciates your efforts Conviser.
• I know nothing of the elements of any crime. I knew them pretty well about three weeks ago, which incidentally was the last time I looked at the Criminal Law Outline. Arson, Common Law Murder? I know they have something in common, no clue what it is. I have not bothered to look it up.
• Ditto for Torts, except it has probably been four weeks. I know a lot of this stuff, but I could not articulate it. An essay on Tort or Crim. Law would screw me at this point. On the exam, I played the "One of these things is not like the other" game.

• Back to arson for second. Those arson questions were ridiculous. There were like six of them that involved arson. Who the fuck cares about arson? May as well ask me a mayhem question (though I probably have a better shot at getting this one right. Hard to forget what mayhem is).
• I Love the Constitution. There is a lot of good stuff in the Constitution. Why I have to know if something is EPC or Due Process of the 14th Amendment or Art. IV something when I could find the answer in two seconds on Wikipedia is beyond me. I know the fucking test, lets move on.

Those are the random annoyances I have. The amazing thing is that, despite my shaky grasp of the material, how many more questions I should have gotten right. There were about 40 questions that I missed that I simply had no fucking clue what the answer was. I did not check the ones I got right, so I do not remember how many wild ass guesses were right. Probably a few, though 40 does seem a bit high for the questions I had no clue on. So this means on 30 to 40 of the questions I missed, I narrowed it down to two and picked wrong. It was surprising how many these turned on understanding the difference between "if" or "once" and I just completely missed it.

Boils down to poor reading comprehension skills. Sure, it is time pressure and all that, but it does not excuse not understanding why every single word is used in the fact pattern and or answer. Something to work on. As I have mentioned before, I have not been practicing taking tests, so maybe that comes with more exposure.

I think I had some overarching point. But it is lost to me know. If this needs to be continued I will post it, sometime in the next year or so.