PMBR 6-day (halfway through) evaluation - don't do it!

I've now gone through three of the six days of the 6-day PMBR course. Here are my initial thoughts: The six-day course may be overkill. I would go as far to say that if you have carried above a B average in law school, you probably don't need it. In fact, I would say that unless you either need a good kick in the butt to study, have some sort of delay between graduation and barbri and have some psychotic studying fetish or simply that you need some sort of wake up call, you probably are just as well off just doing the 3-day.

Since I got suckered into the PMBR six-day course though, here are my thoughts so future law students can make a more informed decision.

First, as I mentioned, if you have any discipline at all, the 6-day course is overkill. Do the 3-day course and get the workbooks with all of PMBR's infringing questions and answers and do an hour's worth a day as they recommend. I realize that in saying the 6-day course is overkill that perhaps the 3-day is also, but I will reserve comment on that until I have taken it. Regarding the six-day course, I will give the lecturer props for giving some helpful mnemonic devices, but I've seen some of them before, and I am sure that Barbri will give similar if not identical ones. Perhaps not.

In the alternative to buying from PMBR, a used book for the pmbr 6-day course with the same questions you'll be doing in the six day course is probably available on ebay at the relevant times of the year, so I'm sure you can save some money if you look around long and hard enough. If you are doing the 3-day course, you get the workbooks anyway and if you can do 33 questions (1 hour) a day, that should be good enough. If not, they are on ebay also. The other bonus items you get with the 6-day course is all of the MBE PMBR cds (29) (I think you get your choice of three subjects with the 3-day course). But you can find all of the pmbr cds on ebay also. In the alternative, you can just buy the PMBR materials from PMBR without doing any of the courses, and I think they charge close to $400. For that, you may as well just do the 3-day course and get them from them.

Second, if you do take the course, and have any discipline to do the test on your own, you should not waste your morning taking the test in PMBR's setting. I'm not sure how realistic it is to have students walk in late and leave early for the real MBE, so you may be better off just going to your library for 1.5-2 hours and doing the test on your own. You can always come in later to hear the lecture. Each day has experienced a significant drop in attendance in the morning testing environment, so I'm telling you in advance to save yourself the time and hassel. On the other hand, if you need to get used to waking up early or have a long commute, it certainly doesn't hurt to go in and take it under their setting either.

Third, the lecture basically emphasizes what is in the answer book and doesn't really add that much to it, so I'm not even sure how worthwhile the lecture is. In listening to the lecture, I've heard several times now where the lecturer represented that "we recreated the problem from last July's MBE." Apparently PMBR isn't following the terms of their injunction, which can be found in the hilarious E.D. Pa. opinion, reported in 458 F.Supp.2d 252. The full opinion can also be found for free here. Oh well. Good for those with the PMBR materials I guess. That being said, I will say that hearing the various high points about the subjects is somewhat useful.

Fourth, I find myself disagreeing with some of the multiple choice answers and some of them distinctly have two right answers, so I'm not sure what PMBR is aiming to get at. I have a strong suspicion they make these questions overly technical and difficult to simply scare people into using their materials, which is probably a good thing overall, so I can't complain about that. For the most part, however, the answers appear to be correct.

While doing through these answers, I am finding myself wondering (more and more) how many of PMBR's questions are actually representative of the real thing. Obviously based on the PMBR lawsuit some of them are copycat questions, but others seem pretty hypertechnical for a typical standardized test. I guess I'll know for sure in July.

Fifth, I haven't taken the 3-day course yet, so I can't comment intelligently on it...yet. It may be worth it, but again, if you have the materials and are disciplined to do the work on your own, it's probably not worth the money. It may be worth it to do a dry run of the MBE in June or July (as PMBR schedules), just to gauge where you are.

Conclusion: I would NOT recommend the six-day PMBR course if you have any sort of discipline to study on your own. Obviously it is a good wake up call for a lot of people. For me though, I am upset at myself that I got suckered in and second, that am going to count as a PMBR statistic when I pass the bar. I'm assuming that PMBR just looks everybody's name up and cross references them so I can't avoid them short of suing them to not count me, which would be a sure loser (and snoozer) of a suit.

All for now. These 50-question exams are killer for a number of reasons, but at least I'm done by 3:30. It's not going to be as bad as some of my friends who are going to suffer through dual days of Barbri and PMBR for the first six days of bar review. Sucks to be them...

Tags: pmbr, 6-day course, pmbr lectures, pmbr sucks