PMBR 3-day lecturer evaluation

I wrote about the PMBR 3-day lecture a couple of weeks ago, and my friend was right in her comments. Although, I left after about an hour and a half to go study on my own, so I will add my two cents as to what I noticed going over the first 25 or so problems.

As I think I mentioned yesterday, I recognized at least 30 questions throughout the test that I had seen before. As a result, I'm not sure whether that is indicative of the real test or not, and I guess I'll find out one way or another soon enough. Again, of the fact patterns questioned, none had more than 2 questions, which doesn't seem realistic at all, but again, we shall see.

The lecture itself was fine. As most of us are aware at this point, there's going to be a curve on the real thing, and the curve will take into account for the fact that the board of bar examiners is grading 190 out of the 200 asked. Since the curve is usually between 15-25 (although I seem to remember some earlier PMBR lecturer saying that the range was 7-21 or thereabouts), they will chip it up a little more just in case. So, I would think that for most bars, you will want to be aiming for a raw score of at least 125, but better to be in the 130-135 range to be safe. Check your jurisdiction. I'm no expert on test taking, so I'm sure you could go lower and may still be okay. "Just be brilliant" as one of my college professors used to say, and you should be fine. Great advice for an objective test, but hopefully you get the point.

From what I sat through of the lecture, it was simple enough. I just didn't get a lot out of it. As a result, I left and spent the rest of the day going through the exam myself to figure out why my seemingly perfect answer sheet was not as accurate as I thought. It made for a very entertaining afternoon with some choice expletives making appearances throughout the session, and I feel that was much more productive, although I think I probably could have done 200 questions on my own from the Barbri book or somewhere else and have gotten just as much out of it.

So, is the three-day worth it? If you didn't do the 6-day, it's probably not too bad to sit down and do a practice full-length test. Also, if you didn't already do Barbri, it probably wouldn't hurt. Then again, at this point in the game, your time may be better spent studying on your own.

I know PMBR has another one in it's book and I'm going to have to take time to do that as well this week. It certainly can't hurt doing 200 more problems under some sort of testing conditions, so I would say that it may be worth taking. If you don't, and you know you have the discipline to study hard on your own, and can do your own mock test, then do that. Buy the books off ebay or PMBR and save your time. The lecture doesn't tell you anything significantly different than what you should have already learned at this point.

Lastly, my comment regarding our PMBR's lecturer's remark that "people who read outlines fail bars," I find that very disturbing and poor advice. How else are you supposed to learn this stuff? It certainly isn't from reading through PMBR's doofy explanations.

Tags: pmbr 3-day, pmbr, pmbr questions, pmbr sucks, barbri sucks