Week 1 Assessment

After the first week of bar preparation classes with Kaplan PMBR, I realize that my work is cut out for me.

This past Monday through Saturday, we had class from 9am to 3:30pm. Each day was a different subject: Torts, Criminal Law, Contracts, Property, Evidence, and Constitutional Law. The pattern for week 1 was to answer 50 multiple choice questions in the morning, questions that were supposed to be somewhat easier than what we will actually see on the exam. Then in the afternoon, a professor went over the answers using power point slides for almost every question.

Unfortunately, this first week taught me that I am not as ready for the bar exam as I had hoped. I am very glad to be doing this bar prep class. There would probably be no shot at passing that little quiz without it.

It was somewhat disheartening to see how many questions I am getting wrong. For example, in Evidence, a subject I consider to be perhaps my strongest, I missed 27 out of 50 questions. For other subjects such as Property, there were whole swaths of questions in areas that I never studied in law school, such as landlord-tenant agreements and mortgages.

The first week of bar prep also made me appreciative of the subjects I took in law school which are also tested on the bar exam. Because I had Evidence in law school, I do not have as far to go in order to start getting more questions right. For many of those questions that I missed in Evidence, I picked the second best answer. But I had no idea what to do in areas of landlord-tenant agreements and mortgages, because these are doctrines and concepts I am seeing for the very first time. Taking a class in Real Estate Finance would have helped with mortgages, but there are only so many electives in the three year program. I needed to take courses that would make me a better litigator as well, and Real Estate Finance was not on that list.

The encouragement comes when the instructors give us the slides explaining the correct answers. I can study these slides and fix many of my weak areas, though it is easier when the subject is already familiar to me.

To be completely honest, it also helps my morale to see many of my fellow students also struggling. I am not sure that anyone is lighting up every subject at this point.

The Florida Bar Exam is probably one of the three most difficult to pass in the whole country- right up there with California and New York.

Yes, this is going to be more intense than every day life in law school. There is enough work in these materials to make it as intense as studying for final exams, but then I would suffer a burn out after a couple or three weeks.

Bar prep is going to be a marathon: Steady discipline and determination to put in the hours without overdoing it in any particular stretch. The concepts will not be too terribly difficult to learn, I think. It is just that there are so many concepts and doctrines and rules to get into my head in the next two months.

Onward and upward. Tomorrow at 9am (actually today as it is now past midnight), is our first session on "Florida" law in Torts.

Until Next Time,

Nathan Marshburn