Bar Exam Essay Structure Workshop
Friday, January 6, PM – Essay Structure Workshop – Central Hower High Room 312
Bar graders spend an average of 2-3 minutes reading each of your essays. Those 2-3 minutes will determine whether you will earn a license to practice law. Make those minutes count! Learn to make your essays grader-friendly.
- Food & informal Q&A starts at 5:30; the workshop starts at 6:00 PM and will last until ~7:30 PM.
- Please bring your computer (if you expect to take the exam using a computer), any essay you have written, OR 2 paper copies of your essay and multiple highlighters of different colors)
- Sign up here so I make sure to bring enough food!
This is the first of five workshops offered in preparation for the February bar exam. (They will be repeated, beginning in June, for the July bar exam. Feel free to attend now, even if you are taking the July bar exam, and get a head start on preparing for the bar exam, especially if you are not taking ALA this semester.)
The rest of the workshop schedule:
- Thursday, January 12 – MPT Outlining Strategies: The concept of an MPT is easy – you don’t need to know anything other than how to write like a lawyer. The execution – not so easy. The outlining technique taught in this workshop allows you to organize and write your essay in the 90 minute time frame.
- Monday, January 16 – MBE Strategies and Tactics: How to approach an MBE question, and a compilation of strategies from multiple sources for avoiding NCBE sneaky tricks, eliminating wrong answers, and choosing between the last two once you’ve eliminated the others.
- Thursday, January 26 – Making up the Rules: How to prepare for, and survive, your mind blanking out at the most inopportune time. The rule-making techniques will help you survive the ultimate failure, as well as improving your rule stack for the majority of the time when you remember the rules.
- Friday, February 3 – MPT Exam Simulation: Every year, a few foolhardy souls never get around to writing any MPT essays until the morning of the first day of the bar exam. That doesn’t usually end well. Take advantage of the opportunity to write an MPT essay under exam conditions.
- Saturday, February 11, 12:00 – 5:00 PM: Half-day Hangout: More food, an informal repeat of any workshops you missed, a chance to ask whatever you haven’t gotten around to asking, I’ll time essays, MPTs, or MBE sets. Whatever (within reason) will help you make it through this final stretch.
Contact Nancy Reeves for additional information. NLR22@uakron.edu