Leaving the Test Behind
Yesterday, I wrote about what to do the mornings of the bar exam: eat a good breakfast, take a short walk, and prime your brain by completing a few familiar practice questions before you enter the examination room.
So, what do you do immediately after you take the bar exam?
Leave the bar exam behind—both physically and mentally.
After finishing up the exam on Tuesday and Wednesday, leave the testing location. Avoid the nervous energy, stressed looks, and exam chatter of the other examinees as they finish up the test. If you’re meeting up with a friend who’s also taking the exam afterwards, consider meeting at another location a short distance away. Maybe leave the bar for another bar!
Once you’re physically away from the testing location, try also not to think—or even talk—about the bar exam. You’ve taken the exam. You can’t change your answers. And there’s no reason to try to recall the questions and try to rehash your answers.
After all, you probably can’t accurately recall the entire fact pattern anyway. Remember that a few specific words in an MBE or essay question can completely change the outcome. Unless you can remember all the facts, it’s not productive to try to re-evaluate how you would have answered the question.
And, in any event, your own performance on the bar exam is only part of the equation in how examiners calculate your score. Since your raw MBE score is scaled and your essay and MPT scores are based on the relative (or rank-ordering) grading philosophy and then adjusted using the same MBE scale, your bar exam performance is actually partially dependent on the performance of other examinees, too.
Also, you might feel like you answered lots of questions incorrectly after you leave the testing room. And you probably did, and but that’s okay. The average mean MBE scaled score is typically anywhere between 139 and 144. That’s likely equivalent to answering about 65% of the MBE questions correctly. To put that another way, that’s the equivalent of answering about 70 questions out of 200 incorrectly.
And since it’s human nature to recall what we do wrong rather than what we do right, those questions you think you might have answered incorrectly are going to be more memorable when, in fact, you likely answered more questions correctly than incorrectly.
Finally, if you need more reason not to rehash the questions after the exam, there’s a more practical reason not to. Here’s the warning provided by the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners in its General Instruction Manual (Section C.6. “Prohibited Behaviors”):
The MPT, MEE and MBE are owned by the NCBE and protected by U.S. copyright laws. You are not permitted to remove or attempt to remove original, duplicated or recorded test materials, notes, reconstructed test questions or answers from the exam room at any time or by any means. This includes sharing the substance or details of any test question fact pattern, option choices, or answer, in whole or in part, by verbal communication, email, blogs, online social or professional networking sites, written notes, or any other means.It is a violation of the Honor Pledge to share examination contents or information about the examination content with anyone. For infractions discovered after the exam, your violations will be reported to the NCBE and to the Board, who may conduct a hearing into your character and fitness, and/or take other actions as well as disqualify your examination scores.
Those are some pretty broad prohibitions!
