New York vs California

In my "NY blog" I basically summed up the "content" side of things -as opposed to the logistics of taking the bar exam- via just one word ("study!"). I'm gonna put a bit more in for California:

I've heard people talk about how the Calbar is more gruelling etc. than NY - so, alright, at 3 days instead of 2, it's 50% more examination, but it's just one more day, right? No big deal ... or maybe it is - maybe I'm just getting old, but I found the extra day quite a burden. YMMV.

Also - academically, I found CA much harder than NY. I don't think it's so much that the topics in the CA syllabus that differ from NY's are harder (and there's still substantial overlap); I feel it's the grading scheme. I recall that for my NY prep, they kept emphasizing "all you need to do is pass" (i.e. you don't need a perfect essay). Well, for CA too "all you need to do is pass": but, to pass you need a score of 1440 out of 2000. That's 72% - an "A" in most grading schemes.

(Which I guess makes sense - if you need a doctor, you don't really want a guy who got half the questions in his/her exam wrong, right? Then again, you're ... unlikely to practice in every field of law simultaneously. But I guess it's a good thing there's a baseline of "everything" that you sort-of-know - I'm finding a surprising level of retention of what I had to read, actually. Although I guess there's no need to get excited about that, who knows how long that will last... :-)

So, basically, you're going to need to know your material quite well; although you could potentially "luck out" and get just the questions for a handful of topics that you prepped for, if you're going to walk in to the exam with just a few subjects under your belt, you're either very much a gambler or really quite desperate. A long list of luminaries have failed the Calbar before. I'd think that if even they have trouble, you should put a little attention into this.

That said, don't forget that it's not enough to "know" stuff, since there'll almost always be something new in the exam that you've not seen anywhere before even if you'd done all your prep work (Honigsberg: "nobody!!!!"); you're gonna need to be able to "wing" a question or two even if you've read "everything" in your prep materials (ha ha ha).

So, while it is possible to pass despite having to "wing" one? a few? questions... I am going to say that if every question looks unfamiliar to you, you'll be seeing the exam again.

In practical terms, because there's just so much to have to go through, unless you're the conscientious type who will follow the study schedule laid out for you, then you're almost certainly going to be surrendering on certain topics.

I will say that you absolutely must know the "big 5" (Contract, Tort, Crim (Law & Pro), Evidence and Consti) because these are useful throughout (both essay and MBE) - if you don't, you're giving yourself a handicap you don't need. And then add to that the major California-unique topics like Community Property and you should have enough to give a decent go of it. You may still fail, but not too embarrassingly :-)

Looking through past exams is very useful but don't rely too much on patterns that you see because if certain intervals between exam questions are obvious to you, they're obvious to the examiners as well:

Even topics that were "spotted" for you by People With More Experience can be wrong - IIRC, when I took my New York exam, every question/topic that was suggested to us by BARBRI as "likely" hot topics failed to show up on the exam :-). I was so far behind my prep for NY that I never got round to doing more than thinking "uh oh" when I saw the "likely topic list", but it turned out that if I'd actually spent time preparing for those, it'd have been time wasted :-)

For my July 2010 CA exam, community property had appeared several times in a row and I decided it wasn't going to be repeated yet again.

Wrong.

Flipped the page - a community property question right there. Fortunately for me, I apparently remembered enough (perhaps because the topic was itself pretty interesting to me, not being the law in my home jurisdiction, and I retained a lot from before?) to wing it successfully.

And I think that's the key thing here - when your course instructors say that knowing the actual law takes a backseat to how you work with the facts as presented, they're not kidding. I suppose if I sign up as a future grader I can confirm whether this is the case or not ... but I don't think I'm so eager to find out as to be prepared to grade exam scripts :-)

So - talk about every issue you see, and talk about everything IRAC-style (this is critical). That said, your essays don't have to be long. Mine certainly weren't. Printed out, they'd be about 3 pages each. Maybe 4 at the very most (and that'd be for one or two of the six essays). There were some people near me who typed and typed and typed (and typed) unceasingly - I'm not sure they were better off.

In order of importance for your preparation - performance tests, essays, then MBE. The way the mathematics works, you'll need to be incredibly, incredibly good at the MBE for it to make any difference if your other sections turn out poorly:

Not worth the effort.

If you can get yourself to a "passing grade" for the MBE, that's all you need, put all the rest of your time on the other two. Especially the performance tests.

Lastly - this is a matter subject to a lot of dispute, but I'm one of those who think the July exam is easier than the February exam. If your scheduling permits, knowing what I know, I'd pick July over Feb. YMMV.