Recent Grads Dish on the Bar Exam

Aron Nimani

By Alex Carmona (2L)

Everyone knows that simply graduating from law school doesn’t actually make you a lawyer. Your last exam of 3L isn’t even the last law exam you ever have to take. There remain…the Bar Exams (or, more properly, the Ontario Licensing Examinations). But, if you’re anything like I was before researching this article, that’s 100% of your knowledge about the Bar. Everything else you know consists of vague rumours and anecdotes from your friend’s roommate’s brother or Suits. What’s on it? How long is it? How do you study for it? To combat this rampaging ignorance, I sat down with Ben Iscoe, Andi Jin and K, three UT law grads who passed the Bar last summer to get some cold, hard info about this nebulous test.

The Structure:

The bar exams are made up of two full-day, 7-hour multiple-choice exams, taken roughly two weeks apart. The LSUC does not provide any substantive teaching to prepare for the exams, but they do provide you with written materials.

The first exam (the barrister examination) tests on public law (constitutional and admin), criminal procedure, family law, civil litigation and ethical and professional responsibility.

The second exam (the solicitor examination) tests on real estate, business law (corporate, bankruptcy and tax), wills, trusts and estate administration and planning and ethical and professional responsibility.

What kind of preparation did you do? Did you take a prep course? If so, would you recommend it? If not, why not?

K: I don’t think a single person in my year took a Bar Exam Prep Course. You don’t need to take a Prep Course because a Prep Course implies that one can prep for the Bar Exam. You don’t study for the bar exam in the traditional way that one thinks of studying law. The exam is an open book multiple choice exam based on a giant binder of Bar Materials provided by LSUC. The questions are often about very minute, specific points of procedural law. These are questions you can’t memorize the answer to unless you spend months memorizing the material. So you study for the bar by creating an index with a group of people that will help you find the answer in the LSUC Bar Materials as quickly as possible. You have about 90 seconds per question, which is usually enough amount of time to find the answer you need. After creating your index, most people my year read the Bar Materials once and highlighted them using a convoluted colour system. You won’t retain most of what you read and you don’t need to retain what you read to pass the Bar; but reading the material once at least make you think you’ve done something to prepare yourself. I didn’t start creating my index until around early-to-mid May. The total time spent studying for both exams was about six weeks.

Ben: I was in an index group of approximately 18 people. We all took a chunk of the material (between 70-110 pages each) and built on an index supplied by previous years (amending page numbers based on how material had changed from the previous year). My studying consisted of doing the above mentioned indexing and then reading and highlighting all material. I had different highlighters for different topics (pink = limitations or dates; blue = policy; purple = cases etc.). In retrospect I would only use two highlighters (one for general and one for dates/limitation periods); things like policy and cases I cannot ever remember being the subject of a question. I did not take a prep course. It’s probably worth noting that studying takes an exceptionally long time. There is somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 pages worth of material and it is very dense. I went at a pace of about 10 pages per hour, which I believe is somewhat the norm.

Andi: I think good prep is to read through the materials once or twice with a few friends and have a rough understanding of: a) the general principles; and b) where everything is in your materials. For example, you don’t need to know the difference between a conditional discharge and a suspended sentence. But! You should know that there is a difference, and you should know that the two are discussed in Chapter 15 or whatever, entitled “Sentencing or some shit similar.” The jury is out on indexes. I was part of an indexing group but I didn’t end up using our index and preferred the table of contents that came with the materials. I didn’t take a prep course, and I don’t know anyone who has. Aren’t they basically scams? You probably shouldn’t take one, they’re expensive, and do you even know who even teaches prep courses? Osgoode grads and commies. That’s who.

What was it like writing the Bar? How difficult was it? Were you worried about passing?

K: The amount of questions that must be answered correctly to pass the bar, and the percentage of test takers who pass the bar are not published by LSUC. It’s natural to think that you may be failing it while taking it because you literally have no idea what it takes to pass the exam. But you won’t fail. You’ll pass. Everyone passes.

Ben: It was somewhat analogous to my LSAT experience in the sense that we were in a giant room (over 1,000 people); each of us with our own desk. In addition to our prep material, I think we could only bring in a Ziplock bag worth of personal belongings, including food and the material we had to empty from our pockets. I remember at one point I left a couple credit cards in my back pocket and an administrator noticed it and asked me to remove in. Despite finding it a little weird that they were for whatever reason looking at my Gluteus Maximus you gotta give’em credit; good eye. When you actually start writing there is a giant clock at the front of the room counting down from three and a half hours (three and a half hours in the morning and three and a half hours in the afternoon). Was I worried about passing? Yup! After the barrister exam, I was confident I would be rewriting in November.

Andi: It was like studying in the Birge reading room except much larger and there was a massive Hunger Games-style digital clock projected on the wall and also unlike the reading room people actually shutted the fuck up.

Did you find that you had an accurate conception of what the Bar entailed when you were in law school?

K: I knew very little about the bar exam while I was in law school. I didn’t know what topics were on it. I didn’t know what an “index” was. I think most of my peers were in a similar boat.

Ben: Nope. The prep session organized by the CDO office after 3L exams assisted, but any twenty minute sit down with a recent grad should suffice.

Andi: I didn’t know they were a thing until after graduation.

If there was one thing you wish you’d know about the bar exam before you took it/started prepping/while you were in law school/etc., what would it be?

K: The Bar has questions where they ask you to calculate child support. LSUC uses an old bank of questions that they just recycle through every year. But the Bar Materials are updated as the laws change. So when the Federal Child Support Guidelines were updated, the Bar Materials were updated but the actual questions on the Bar weren’t. So when you calculate child support, the correct answer you calculate will be a few dollars off from the correct answer on the bar exam.

Ben: It takes a terrific amount of time to get through material. The gist I got from most people is that the average pace hovered around 10 pages an hours. I also wished that I spend more time using the index provided by the law society. Despite my index group doing a very thorough job, I found the Law Society index much more succinct and helpful.

Andi: That it’ll be okay! Odds are, no matter how many people who have done this before tell you it’ll be okay, the majority of you are going to go stressballs bonkers over this exam anyway. But still, seriously, it’ll be okay. Think about all the exams you’ve written in your life. There are literally dozens of them. Bar ads are just another exam. Also keep in mind that this is a pass/fail exam. You don’t need to rock faces. Just like Faculty policy when it comes to the number of promotional photos featuring David St. Bernard, you should aim for a solid 60%.

Is there anything else you think would be interesting and relevant to put in the article, or that law students should be aware of?

K: 1) Don’t worry about the bar exam. It’s a joke. It’s a stain on our profession. It is a test of how quickly one can read a large amount of multiple choice questions and find an answer in a very large book and not at all a test of one’s aptitude in the legal profession. 2) Keep it easy on the highlighters when you read. 3) Just skip the tax chapters of the Bar Materials entirely. They are indecipherable and tax questions compose about 5 questions total on the Solicitors Exam. 4) Focus on the Professional Responsibility Section. It is the bulk of both exams.

Ben: The most unnerving thing is the unknown. It is not revealed (a) how many people pass; (b) what percentage of people pass; or (c) what absolute mark you need to obtain to pass. Furthermore, there is very little practice material available. So, in essence, you have little insight about what the questions are and how well you have to do on these unknown questions to pass. My perception of the exam was that after you read every single question you would readily be able to consult your index, look up and then answer and then move onto the next question. Not so much. I could not find the answer to a significant number of questions. For far less than half of the questions was I able to readily look up the answer to as described above.

Andi: Budget yourself a lot of time to get to the physical exam the morning of. The exams are held near the CNE, and unless you live nearby in Liberty Village like some sort of left-handed, kale-powered hippie, you’re going to need to subway and it’s a difficult trip. Unless you take a cab/Uber because you’re wealthy, in which case, hi, how are you and do you have a thing for civil servants of average height?

The print version of this article erroneously credit Tyler Cohen as the author of this article.

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