As you begin your bar prep, contemplate the challenges you might face along the way and proactively make a plan to help you stay on track. As you do so, consider common mistakes made by bar studiers and implement strategies to avoid these pitfalls.
Mistake #1: Not factoring your personal life, outside responsibilities, and time off into your study plan
Bar prep can be overwhelming at first and it is incredibly easy to get laser-focused on the lengthy list of assignments on your study schedule that you forget about the other aspects of your life.
Although it is important to be disciplined with your studies, neglecting to factor your personal life, responsibilities, and brain breaks (doing something–anything–other than thinking about the bar exam) into your study plan can lead to you feeling isolated, overwhelmed, and burnt out. To avoid this common pitfall during bar prep, take time to consider these factors and mindfully schedule them into your study plan.
Remember…
You are allowed to have a personal life during bar prep. So, prioritize quality time with family and friends and pencil in time for other activities you enjoy. Go celebrate your friend’s birthday, enjoy a cookout with family, attend your cousin’s wedding, join that weekly yoga class and watch that new movie you have been dying to see. To truly enjoy these events, without stressing about the studying you are not doing, add them to your schedule as soon as possible and then adapt your plan to get ahead on your studies in advance of the occasion. Then, the event will feel like a reward for achieving a goal.
Allocate time to manage your other responsibilities. Life doesn’t stop for bar prep – you still must take care of family and pets, pay bills, attend personal appointments and so on. If you are fortunate enough to be in a position to ask others for help or delegate certain responsibilities, now is the time to ask. If you are managing everything on your own, block time in your study plan to account for these outside responsibilities. And reschedule or defer those low-priority appointments and tasks until after the bar exam.
Schedule time off. Do whatever you want or absolutely nothing at all. These brain breaks will keep you going! Plus, inevitably, something will happen during bar prep that will throw you off your study plan, such as a family emergency or illness and it will be easier to adapt to unanticipated time away from bar prep when you have already created buffers in your schedule.
Mistake #2: Failing to prepare for every subject and each component of the bar exam
During bar prep, you will review more subjects in a 10 to 20-week study program than you did during an entire year of law school, and that can feel very overwhelming. During your first week of bar prep, you might feel excited (you may even find studying somewhat enjoyable), but by week three, the days can feel monotonous and indistinguishable and it’s easy to lose motivation and fall behind in your studies. When this happens, the temptation is to start skipping tasks, like reading outlines, watching videos and completing practice questions.
Once you start omitting tasks, it becomes easier to skip review of an entire subject – especially a subject you did well in during law school, a subject you dislike or are intimidated by because you did not take the class, or a subject where there is a massive amount of information to review.
Once you start skipping subjects, it also becomes easier to avoid practice for components of the exam altogether – performance tests because they are lengthy and time-consuming, essays because you do not feel confident enough in your grasp of the rules to start writing and multiple-choice questions because you scored lower on your first practice sets than you anticipated.
It is not the end of the world if you miss some assignments here and there but you cannot skip review of an entire subject altogether. And you certainly cannot go into the bar exam without having done some practice for each component of the test – essays, multiple-choice and/or performance tests. Do not let yourself make excuses for skipping subjects and practice.
Review every subject eligible for testing on the exam and do enough practice questions for each component of the exam to have the necessary foundation to earn a passing score. By reviewing every subject and practicing each component, you will be able to make logical analyses, feel confident to make educated guesses when needed and understand the expectations for each component and how to complete them within time constraints on exam day.
Mistake #3: Failing to create personalized study tools before the homestretch of bar prep
During the last three to four weeks of bar prep, the focus shifts from an in-depth substantive review of each subject to intense memorization and practice of essays, multiple-choice and/or performance tests. At this point, you want your final review tools and study aids ready to go so that you can shift gears right into memorization and practice mode.
Often bar studiers get so consumed by the daily grind of bar prep that they put off creating personalized study tools – such as flashcards, issue checklists, mini-outlines and mind maps – until the final weeks of their studies. Unfortunately, it is impossible to create study tools for a dozen or more subjects in such a brief time, and often when bar studiers attempt this feat, they end up spending most of their last precious weeks of bar prep making review tools instead of using them to help with focused practice opportunities and memorization.
Instead of waiting until the final weeks to create personalized study tools, start working on them earlier in your studies.
When you finish all your assigned tasks for the day and still have some energy to do a little more work, or when “review” is scheduled in your study plan, carve out some time to create final review tools for one subject. Continue this approach until you have final review tools for each subject. By the time you shift your focus to memorization and practice in the final weeks of study, you will have everything you need to rock the homestretch of bar prep.
Knowing common pitfalls ahead of time and implementing strategies to avoid them will help you stay on track and prepared for bar success!
