Sunday, July 08, 2007

PMBR Blue Book MBE curve

Someone passed along to me this comment to post. I am told that the PMBR curves for the 3-day are 36 points, and the curve for the full length MBE in the back of the blue book is 25 points. This comes directly from a PMBR/Kaplan rep.

The better question, and one I won't be able to answer for a couple weeks is how close PMBR questions are to the real thing. Stay tuned. Once I have the PMBR 3-day taken next week, I'll have a better post to compare it to Barbri's 3-day.

Also, I've been working through Barbri's multiple choice questions. They are largely identical to PMBR in substance, which leads me to wonder why PMBR and Barbri haven't sued each other yet. Or why the NCBE only chose to go after PMBR. More thoughts on comparing Barbri to PMBR later.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, i'm in the PMBR 3-day right now. I'm fairly sure they are still using the enjoined questions because the questions cited in the opinion are still on the exam i just took. Just some FYI for what it is worth. E.g., the "X10 widget" (MBE question) is still used as the "X-10 gidget" (PMBR question) on the test I finished yesterday. Also, the full question example that is cited from the 113 questions in the opinion is still on the PMBR exam. Weird. Not sure it is worth anything because NCBE is said to have changed the questions, but there ya go.

ECL said...

Thanks for your comment - that's pretty funny. Hopefully they corrected the answer to the full question example from the PMBR opinion.

As far as what you point out that they don't seem to have complied with their injunction, I tend to agree as far as I can tell. During the six-day, our proctor mentioned that many of the same questions appeared on the February 2007 exam despite the fact that NCBE alluded to the fact they were going to "retire" them after the lawsuit. Seems kind of fishy, although they somewhat qualified it by saying that "students reported to us." I don't believe that at all.

Nonetheless, I hope the NCBE holds off retiring all of PMBR's stolen questions for one more go. After the real thing, I plan on creating an entry of how many PMBR and Barbri questions I saw on the real thing.

The part of me that wants to pass the bar hopes there are a ton (with the added hope that PMBR is, in fact, right in their answer. The realistic part of me that continues to study the convisor outlines and what not hopes (slightly, but not too much) that PMBR is way off so I can state unequivocally that PMBR is not worth it at all.

I suspect that I will still create an entry saying that PMBR is not worth the price of the phone call to pay for it or the stamp to send in your payment. Of course, if your firm is paying for it, then who cares.

Unknown said...

Hey, hopefully you have a way of checking comments on your old posts. I'm taking the Florida bar in two weeks and wondered if you had any general tips. I'm in BarBri and have been plugging away doing 6-8 hours of studying per day since the beginning of June. I'm about to take PMBR on Friday (I can tell you LOVED IT).

So, any tips for the last two weeks? I've been hitting about 65-70% on the Bar-Bri questions, but I like your idea about constantly re-reading the Conviser mini-review.

Hopefully you check this out!

ECL said...

If you're hitting 65-70% on the Barbri questions, you're probably in better shape than most. I would see how you do on the PMBR test and hope you're within whatever range they suggest is good.

As far as the last two weeks, I would treat it like finals. I dialed down on the number of multiple choice I was doing and started focusing almost exclusively on memorizing outlines for the essay topics and state specific stuff.

In the last day or two before the exam, I didn't do much of anything but relax. If you look over some of my other entries from June/July 2007, there may be more specific thoughts I had, but the overall theme is just to get a solid day of studying in 6 days/week instead of 5 (and maybe a little bit of review on the 7th day), and you should be fine. Good luck!