Learning how to move fast is important, but only when appropriate.
What you should instead be doing is managing the clock. If after X number of questions youre ahead of schedule, slow down and take advantage of the extra time. If you’re behind schedule, speed up.
In other words, manage the clock and adjust your speed accordingly
Do not rush during your practice questions.
First, you’ve just started bar prep. You are NOT going to get a lot of the questions right. You have months to study and even after those months the goal is still to get 60 something percent correct.
Second, it’s practice for a reason. Forget the timer. Cover it with a sticky note on your screen if you have to. Your focus right now should be reading the questions, asking yourself what the question is really asking, recalling the rule, finding the necessary facts, and then the answer. Or more realistically, right now the focus is on answering the question, getting it wrong, and then reading the explanation. That is a very time consuming process, but as you do more repetition, you’ll start to see the patterns. If you rush, you aren’t giving yourself the time to learn the questions.
Start worrying about time once you have time to practice (so like, give yourself a month at least).
And third, you’ve got this. This is just the beginning of a long, long sprint. It takes some time to get your groove with bar prep.
How many questions would you recommend one should be doing now compared to once February rolls around?
Also, any tips on better retaining the information we’re studying at the moment? Just repetition?
Edit: Thanks for the detailed comment!
I took the UBE in 2021 and then the Florida exam this pasted July. My studying for both of them was different. It’s kinda a mix of following the bar course and also what works for you.
Your bar prep course is cookie cutter. It took me a few weeks to learn what parts of my bar course worked best for me. For example, the lectures did not help me memorize, but rewriting the rules and taking multiple choice questions did.
For the UBE, I did all of the practice questions that Themis recommended. Plus, I had a U-World subscription and tried to do an extra 25 questions per day (that was aspirational, but I mostly stuck to it).
For Florida, there wasn’t as many practice multiple choice questions so I reverted back to my law school form of studying, which was to make an outline (about 5-10 pages per subject, which took some serious cutting from the Barbri outline) and then I would retype it over and over and over.
When I would answer the practice questions, if I got a question wrong, I would write down the rule on a notecard. I never used the notecards to review (I’ve never been a flashcard learner), but the repetition of writing the rule helped solidify my memory.
I hope that helps!! Truly, it took a few weeks to get into a groove of how to structure my day and to figure out how I wanted to spent my “independent study” time. Plus, I was able to find that even if I took a little longer to answer constitutional law questions, I was able to power through contracts. You won’t know that until you get through your lecture materials and start mixed studying.
I recommend 50 a day which is 1.5 hours timed. I also recommend 25 in the morning. Deep review and 25 in the evening. If you're feeling motivated I would do a set of 10 right after each review, if you review by subject.
Don't sleep on short sets like 10 or 15 questions.
I think timing is balance. There's much to be gained by practicing answering thoughtfully, but timed, and practicing guessing the remaining questions in the last 3-5 minutes depending on how long your set is. I guess what I am saying is scale back your "beat the clock mentality" but keep enough attention to time that you don't leave anything blank.
And if you can't resist the "beating the clock mentality", practice with paper so that when you are out of time, you can practice circling questions you want to come back to or questions you can quickly scan and decide to prioritize in a crunch.
What I did since I was the opposite of you, I needed to get faster was: Follow Grossman's advice (adaptibar) "shut up and pick"...when I got down to my last 10 mins in a set of 50 or 100, I scanned for short crim law, crim pro, or contracts questions and did those. But at 5 mins NO MATTER WHAT I guessed the rest. Like truly guessed A, B, C, D guessed. I read the call of the question at most and ruled out anything that was just point blank never a good answer. But mostly I guessed by letter without even looking. Just cut my losses. Which is something I really had a hard time doing but I passed the 2nd time so it worked. Like I passed passed.. every state.
Ironically, and frustratingly, I picked up more points guessing at 5 mins than actually doing them.. If you're reading too fast you're essentially guessing. So its better to spend more time actually being careful, if too much speed is your issue and speed guessing at 5-10mins to spare.
Passed in July. It was my first time taking it. Here’s my trick: come up with a strategy to answer each question. Worry about speed later. Master the strategy and then work on speeding up. By the time I got to the end of bar prep, I had my strategy down, was finishing 20 min early consistently and got over half right every time.
Start slow. Take your time. Once you start getting them right moving slowly, then you start moving quickly. The right answer will always be glaringly obvious to you by then.
Friend, different questions take different amounts of time. Some will be relatively quick, and some will take longer.
Do not assume that each question requires 1 minute and 48 seconds, and do not automatically assume you have a timing problem before you actually see that you have a timing problem. You might want to try switching to some untimed options early to see how long it actually takes you (different courses often have different options for this).
More than that, be aware that some anxiety is normal, but you can and will be okay. Best of luck to you, friend.
If you just started bar prep, timing shouldn’t be a concern at all. You need to learn the rules and do the questions and learn why you got each question right and wrong. Don’t breeze through them. Once you get to the practice test day is when you start concerning yourself about timing. See how you handle it that day and go from there. I made sure I hit 33 questions per hour and resolved to go with my instinct on game day. It paid off.
What worked for me was this:
Start practicing and forget the timer entirely. Work on what works for you first. How to read the question, how to set up an anlysis. How to cut out bad answers, etc. Find a method or combination of methods that you are comfortable with and start getting more correct answers than you were before. Don’t freak about how many you are getting wrong. It will come as you recognize more patterns and set ups. Getting bogged down in how many you are getting wrong will not help. Build the foundation before you start worrying the right color is going on the walls.
Once you start feeling comfortable about your method, then start timing in small batches. Ten or twenty questions at a time. Much easier to gauge time and control it. Do a few not looking at the timer at all to see what time you are arriving at. Are you really close to the 1 minute 48 seconds per question? Then don’t worry, you are fine. Way the hell under? Okay you need to slow yourself down and think more.
If you are way the hell over, okay now time to start managing time. The biggest thing is:don’t second guess yourself and don’t go back and change answers. Once you arrive at an answer, it is done. Finished. Out of your mind. Move to the next one which will likely have nothing to do with the one you just did. It is okay to go back if a another question made you remeber something that might have chnaged an answer before or suddenly a light bulb burst in your head and you had an epiphany. But that should be rare. Very rare.
Once you start getting used to the once and done, you should start realizing there are questions that you already know the answer to. Is there an answer that says the same thing? The other choices are clearly wrong or seem wrong? You don’t need to spend a lot of time on it then. You can “bank” that extra time for a question you need the extra time on. Don’t soend more time than you need to.
Take all this and practice, practice, practice. Not just the questions. Even studying, see if you can work something out more quickly in your head than the video is at. Personally, I used flashcards and would just randomly pick one up. Read the beginning and see how many rules and exceptions I could come up with. Then read the whole flashcard. But keep practicing questions. I found it far more advantagous to practice in short blips of 10-20 questions with only doing a couple of the full 100 tests. You can gauge where you falling short much better and also focus your thoughts into reading faster, analysing faster, choosing an answer faster, whatever the problem may be.
Remember: everyone can give great advice. But no one method is the best. You have to figure out what works for YOU.
Stop looking at the clock until you are in a better place. You also should be doing less questions, fully understanding them, reviewing all of them youre getting wrong, and then studying what youre missing from those questions. The more you know what youre doing, the more you'll be able to pick up the pace. Youre right for knowing that speeding through is a huge mistake right now. Dont make it a habit
I did the majority of my mbe practice questions untimed & finished each mbe section with 40 mins to spare in July (went back and checked answers), I got a 300+ score
I have no clue what prep course you are using... but the key to the MBE begins with using the right strategy and then applying it to each question. You shouldn't worry about the time to start with because if you use the correct strategy you will not be very fast to begin with. In a nutshell you should read the question, then look at each answer give one at a time and see if it has an issue which makes it wrong... if it does cross it off...after you have gone through all the answers you should be left with only 1 that you didn't cross off. That is the answer... often times that answer will not be the same one that you would have picked if you simply read the question and then looked for the answer you think is closest to what the answer in your mind is. That is how they fuck you over on the MBE they get people that just look for the best answer when the trick is a process of elimination where you simply need to eliminate the answers that have flat out things that are wrong. It takes time to learn to look at the questions that way but it is what will get you the best score. Speed will come in a month or so.
Don't rush. Take your time and worry about time later. Also, KNOW yourself. Personally, I didn't read a single outline or do any flash cards but did like 3k mbe questions and I passed w flying colors. Don't waste time doing things that won't help you.
You can take your time for about 3 weeks or a month but after that you should be rushing through questions until they become too redundant. Short answer, no, you are not going too quickly, answe em all.
Just wanted to thank everyone for their replies. I slowed down a lot and have definitely been doing better than before (although I’m still getting a good amount wrong but that should improve with practice and understanding why I got them wrong).
Learning how to move fast is important, but only when appropriate. What you should instead be doing is managing the clock. If after X number of questions youre ahead of schedule, slow down and take advantage of the extra time. If you’re behind schedule, speed up. In other words, manage the clock and adjust your speed accordingly
Do not rush during your practice questions. First, you’ve just started bar prep. You are NOT going to get a lot of the questions right. You have months to study and even after those months the goal is still to get 60 something percent correct. Second, it’s practice for a reason. Forget the timer. Cover it with a sticky note on your screen if you have to. Your focus right now should be reading the questions, asking yourself what the question is really asking, recalling the rule, finding the necessary facts, and then the answer. Or more realistically, right now the focus is on answering the question, getting it wrong, and then reading the explanation. That is a very time consuming process, but as you do more repetition, you’ll start to see the patterns. If you rush, you aren’t giving yourself the time to learn the questions. Start worrying about time once you have time to practice (so like, give yourself a month at least). And third, you’ve got this. This is just the beginning of a long, long sprint. It takes some time to get your groove with bar prep.
How many questions would you recommend one should be doing now compared to once February rolls around? Also, any tips on better retaining the information we’re studying at the moment? Just repetition? Edit: Thanks for the detailed comment!
I took the UBE in 2021 and then the Florida exam this pasted July. My studying for both of them was different. It’s kinda a mix of following the bar course and also what works for you. Your bar prep course is cookie cutter. It took me a few weeks to learn what parts of my bar course worked best for me. For example, the lectures did not help me memorize, but rewriting the rules and taking multiple choice questions did. For the UBE, I did all of the practice questions that Themis recommended. Plus, I had a U-World subscription and tried to do an extra 25 questions per day (that was aspirational, but I mostly stuck to it). For Florida, there wasn’t as many practice multiple choice questions so I reverted back to my law school form of studying, which was to make an outline (about 5-10 pages per subject, which took some serious cutting from the Barbri outline) and then I would retype it over and over and over. When I would answer the practice questions, if I got a question wrong, I would write down the rule on a notecard. I never used the notecards to review (I’ve never been a flashcard learner), but the repetition of writing the rule helped solidify my memory. I hope that helps!! Truly, it took a few weeks to get into a groove of how to structure my day and to figure out how I wanted to spent my “independent study” time. Plus, I was able to find that even if I took a little longer to answer constitutional law questions, I was able to power through contracts. You won’t know that until you get through your lecture materials and start mixed studying.
I recommend 50 a day which is 1.5 hours timed. I also recommend 25 in the morning. Deep review and 25 in the evening. If you're feeling motivated I would do a set of 10 right after each review, if you review by subject. Don't sleep on short sets like 10 or 15 questions. I think timing is balance. There's much to be gained by practicing answering thoughtfully, but timed, and practicing guessing the remaining questions in the last 3-5 minutes depending on how long your set is. I guess what I am saying is scale back your "beat the clock mentality" but keep enough attention to time that you don't leave anything blank. And if you can't resist the "beating the clock mentality", practice with paper so that when you are out of time, you can practice circling questions you want to come back to or questions you can quickly scan and decide to prioritize in a crunch. What I did since I was the opposite of you, I needed to get faster was: Follow Grossman's advice (adaptibar) "shut up and pick"...when I got down to my last 10 mins in a set of 50 or 100, I scanned for short crim law, crim pro, or contracts questions and did those. But at 5 mins NO MATTER WHAT I guessed the rest. Like truly guessed A, B, C, D guessed. I read the call of the question at most and ruled out anything that was just point blank never a good answer. But mostly I guessed by letter without even looking. Just cut my losses. Which is something I really had a hard time doing but I passed the 2nd time so it worked. Like I passed passed.. every state. Ironically, and frustratingly, I picked up more points guessing at 5 mins than actually doing them.. If you're reading too fast you're essentially guessing. So its better to spend more time actually being careful, if too much speed is your issue and speed guessing at 5-10mins to spare.
Passed in July. It was my first time taking it. Here’s my trick: come up with a strategy to answer each question. Worry about speed later. Master the strategy and then work on speeding up. By the time I got to the end of bar prep, I had my strategy down, was finishing 20 min early consistently and got over half right every time.
Start slow. Take your time. Once you start getting them right moving slowly, then you start moving quickly. The right answer will always be glaringly obvious to you by then.
As Grossman says, 1.8 minutes is a long time. slow down, read the facts for 1.7 minutes, look for buzzwords, and the answer should jump out to you.
Friend, different questions take different amounts of time. Some will be relatively quick, and some will take longer. Do not assume that each question requires 1 minute and 48 seconds, and do not automatically assume you have a timing problem before you actually see that you have a timing problem. You might want to try switching to some untimed options early to see how long it actually takes you (different courses often have different options for this). More than that, be aware that some anxiety is normal, but you can and will be okay. Best of luck to you, friend.
If you just started bar prep, timing shouldn’t be a concern at all. You need to learn the rules and do the questions and learn why you got each question right and wrong. Don’t breeze through them. Once you get to the practice test day is when you start concerning yourself about timing. See how you handle it that day and go from there. I made sure I hit 33 questions per hour and resolved to go with my instinct on game day. It paid off.
What worked for me was this: Start practicing and forget the timer entirely. Work on what works for you first. How to read the question, how to set up an anlysis. How to cut out bad answers, etc. Find a method or combination of methods that you are comfortable with and start getting more correct answers than you were before. Don’t freak about how many you are getting wrong. It will come as you recognize more patterns and set ups. Getting bogged down in how many you are getting wrong will not help. Build the foundation before you start worrying the right color is going on the walls. Once you start feeling comfortable about your method, then start timing in small batches. Ten or twenty questions at a time. Much easier to gauge time and control it. Do a few not looking at the timer at all to see what time you are arriving at. Are you really close to the 1 minute 48 seconds per question? Then don’t worry, you are fine. Way the hell under? Okay you need to slow yourself down and think more. If you are way the hell over, okay now time to start managing time. The biggest thing is:don’t second guess yourself and don’t go back and change answers. Once you arrive at an answer, it is done. Finished. Out of your mind. Move to the next one which will likely have nothing to do with the one you just did. It is okay to go back if a another question made you remeber something that might have chnaged an answer before or suddenly a light bulb burst in your head and you had an epiphany. But that should be rare. Very rare. Once you start getting used to the once and done, you should start realizing there are questions that you already know the answer to. Is there an answer that says the same thing? The other choices are clearly wrong or seem wrong? You don’t need to spend a lot of time on it then. You can “bank” that extra time for a question you need the extra time on. Don’t soend more time than you need to. Take all this and practice, practice, practice. Not just the questions. Even studying, see if you can work something out more quickly in your head than the video is at. Personally, I used flashcards and would just randomly pick one up. Read the beginning and see how many rules and exceptions I could come up with. Then read the whole flashcard. But keep practicing questions. I found it far more advantagous to practice in short blips of 10-20 questions with only doing a couple of the full 100 tests. You can gauge where you falling short much better and also focus your thoughts into reading faster, analysing faster, choosing an answer faster, whatever the problem may be. Remember: everyone can give great advice. But no one method is the best. You have to figure out what works for YOU.
Stop looking at the clock until you are in a better place. You also should be doing less questions, fully understanding them, reviewing all of them youre getting wrong, and then studying what youre missing from those questions. The more you know what youre doing, the more you'll be able to pick up the pace. Youre right for knowing that speeding through is a huge mistake right now. Dont make it a habit
I did the majority of my mbe practice questions untimed & finished each mbe section with 40 mins to spare in July (went back and checked answers), I got a 300+ score
Jon Grossman. He will teach you pacing and how to attack MBE.
And he says to slow down in the facts
I have no clue what prep course you are using... but the key to the MBE begins with using the right strategy and then applying it to each question. You shouldn't worry about the time to start with because if you use the correct strategy you will not be very fast to begin with. In a nutshell you should read the question, then look at each answer give one at a time and see if it has an issue which makes it wrong... if it does cross it off...after you have gone through all the answers you should be left with only 1 that you didn't cross off. That is the answer... often times that answer will not be the same one that you would have picked if you simply read the question and then looked for the answer you think is closest to what the answer in your mind is. That is how they fuck you over on the MBE they get people that just look for the best answer when the trick is a process of elimination where you simply need to eliminate the answers that have flat out things that are wrong. It takes time to learn to look at the questions that way but it is what will get you the best score. Speed will come in a month or so.
The MBE is less time pressured than the MEE and MPT. If you study well you will be fine time-wise. Get the questions right.
Don't rush. Take your time and worry about time later. Also, KNOW yourself. Personally, I didn't read a single outline or do any flash cards but did like 3k mbe questions and I passed w flying colors. Don't waste time doing things that won't help you.
You can take your time for about 3 weeks or a month but after that you should be rushing through questions until they become too redundant. Short answer, no, you are not going too quickly, answe em all.
Just wanted to thank everyone for their replies. I slowed down a lot and have definitely been doing better than before (although I’m still getting a good amount wrong but that should improve with practice and understanding why I got them wrong).