Don't Let Missed Questions Bother You on Exam Day
Last year around this time, Dustin Johnson was the best professional golfer in the world.
If you don’t follow golf, or know who Dustin Johnson is, Johnson won the 2020 Masters Tournament. He’s only the fourth player in PGA TOUR history to win in each of his first 14 seasons on TOUR, joining Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—all giants in the game of golf.
Dustin has a stoic, calm demeanor with an approach to the game that some of his TOUR professionals call “boring.”
But that “boring” game of golf, and more specifically, not getting rattled from one shot to the next, has helped him become the number player in the world.
He once explained: “I’m the best player in the world, I hit some of the worst shots you’ve ever seen. But I go find it and hit it again. Obviously not all of them are bad but I do hit bad shots. It’s managing those shots and not letting it bother you and going and hitting the next one good.”
Nobody’s perfect—and even the best golfers in the world can’t birdie every hole, or even have a bogey-free round. Over the course of a professional tournament, golfers will have 72 holes to compete against the golf course.
Over those 72 holes, they’ll hit, on average, around 288 shots. Some shots will be good. Some will be bad. But the best golfers in the world will not let the bad shots impact the rest of their performance over the four days of the tournament.
You should adopt this mentality as you complete the MBE. You’ll have 200 questions on the multiple-choice exam. You’ll answer some questions right and some questions wrong. In fact, if you’re average—and remember that average is good on the bar exam—you’ll likely going to answer 70 out of the 200 questions incorrectly. And there may be several questions that could just very well stupefy you. Maybe you didn’t recall the law. Maybe it’s the one area you decided not to focus on. Maybe it’s a pilot question testing a weird principle that’s not even going to count against you.
Whatever may be the case, remember that you’re going to get questions wrong. And it’s just human nature to remember the questions we missed rather than the countless of questions we actually correctly answered.
But you don’t want a few difficult questions here and there on the examination to impact your performance on the rest of the exam. Just chalk up those questions to one or more of the 70 or so questions that it’s okay to miss.
Be like Dustin Johnson on the golf course—don’t let it the hard questions bother you as you answer the next questions.