Bar/Bri Begins

Barbri bar review started last week.
It is primarily (ok, actually) a series of video lectures. The real work is in the reading before the lecture and the answering of questions after the lecture in order to learn the material. Every thing that was learned in law school must be re-learned, summarized, applied, and distinguished.
The multiple choice portion of the bar will test fine line distinctions in the law and the essays will test your ability to put it all together.
Some subjects we didn’t learn in law school, others we did. Nonetheless we must learn the material as the bar examiners will test it, not necessarily how it is applied in real life.
The schedule is detailed as to what needs to be completed, and quite frankly, there is little time to spare

I was surprised by the few number of people attending the lecture. We elected to take the evening class. There are about 30 people attending at night, and less than 50 during the day lectures. That means that about 80 people are taking the Barbri classes and a few more who opted to only take the IPOD version of the taped lectures. I suspect that it is not that many. Between about 450 and 600 people will take February Georgia bar exam with us. So, surprisingly, only a small portion of the bar takers are actually taking the Bar/Bri review course.

There are other review courses out there, but Barbri is by far the most popular and most other courses also recommend that you take Barbri as well. I have to admit that the information so far leads me to believe that Barbri has done their research as to what is and is not likely to be on the exam. The bar exam passage rate for the February exam is less than 60%. It seems absurd that someone would not take the time to do a bar review course. Hopefully this will increase our chances on the scale. I certainly hope so. The course schedule has been the most helpful thing so far. Until I got the schedule I was kind of lost as to what I needed to be studying and how much emphasis I needed to put on each subject. Barbri kind of takes that out of your hands so that you don’t have to worry about deciding on it. The trade off is that the volume of work is much greater than you probably would have done on your own. However, that is probably a good thing.

I have to take breaks every once in a while because the volume of information is crushing to re-learn or in some cases to learn anew. So I am taking this time to write a short blog. This is something that I have neglected to the point that I am sure that I have lost a great deal of readers. But I feel sure that I will make more entries over the next few weeks.