The Year of the Horse and the Bar Exam Next Week: Stay in Your Lane

The Lunar New Year begins today, and it ushers in the Year of the Horse (specifically the Fire Horse). If you’re taking the bar exam next week, that timing feels almost too perfect. Horses don’t win by darting all over the track. They win by staying controlled, conserving energy, and moving forward with purpose.

That’s exactly what the bar exam rewards too, especially at this stage.

Here’s the theme for the remaining few days of your bar preparation: Stay in your lane. And the fastest way to stay in your lane is simple: Identify the narrow issue.

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What “Stay in Your Lane” Means on the Bar Exam

On essays, you’re not being graded on how much law you can recite. You’re being graded on whether you can identify the issues the question is testing, state the governing rules clearly, and apply those rules to the specific facts you were given. If you drift into extra issues that aren’t supported by the facts or aren’t called for by the question, you’re spending time on material that doesn’t earn points. You’re also borrowing that time from the issues that do.

In other words, bar exam success is often less about “knowing more” and more about writing less, better.

The same idea applies to multiple-choice questions. “Stay in your lane” on the MBE means you don’t turn every question into a full outline dump. You identify what the call of the question is actually testing, answer that, and resist getting pulled into tempting side issues that aren’t required to pick the best answer.

In practice, read with a narrow mission: (1) what’s the legal decision I have to make, and (2) what single fact makes one answer better than the rest? Most wrong answers aren’t “crazy.” They’re answers to a different question than the one asked.

Start with the Call of the Question, and Don't Let Go of It

Most point leaks happen when students answer a question the examiners didn’t ask.

So before you write a single word on an essay or commit to an answer choice on multiple choice, force your brain to translate the call of the question into a narrow issue statement. This isn’t busywork. It’s lane discipline.

A narrow issue statement does two things at once: it tells you what legal decision you’re making, and it tells you what you’re not spending time on.

Instead of writing something broad like “The issue is negligence,” narrow it to the real decision-point the facts are testing. For example: “Did the defendant breach the applicable standard of care?” Or, if the question is even more specific: “Should the court apply the reasonably prudent person standard or a professional standard of care here?”

That same move works on multiple choice. Don’t tell yourself, “This is a negligence question.” Tell yourself, “This question turns on whether the standard of care was breached,” or “This question turns on proximate cause,” or “This question turns on duty to a particular plaintiff.”

When you name the narrow issue, you stop wandering. Your rule statement gets tighter, your analysis gets cleaner, and your multiple-choice elimination gets faster because you’re solving the problem the bar actually wrote, not the one your anxious brain wants to write.

Use the Facts as Guardrails

The bar exam gives you guardrails. The facts aren’t decoration. They’re signals. Staying in your lane is largely the skill of spotting which facts are doing legal work and using them to build a narrow issue statement.

When a fact is included, ask yourself: “What is this fact trying to make me decide?” Then convert that answer into a lane-setting sentence.

Instead of labeling the topic (“negligence,” “hearsay,” “search and seizure”), use the fact to define the decision-point.

• If the fact describes precautions, alternatives, or how the defendant acted, the lane is often breach. Ask: Did the defendant’s conduct fall below the applicable standard of care?

• If the fact describes timing, intervening events, or multiple causes, the lane is often causation. Ask: Was the harm a foreseeable result, or was there a superseding cause?

• If the fact describes who said what, when, and why it’s being offered, the lane is often truth versus non-truth purpose. Ask: Is this statement being offered for its truth, and if so, does an exemption or exception apply?

This works the same way on multiple choice. Once you identify the fact doing the work, you can ignore answer choices that are “true law” but belong to a different lane. On essays, it keeps you from dumping your outline. On the MBE, it keeps you from chasing shiny distractors.

Bottom line: Treat key facts like guardrails. They don’t just tell you what to discuss. They tell you what not to discuss.

The Lane-Switch Traps that Crush Otherwise Good Exams

Final week is when lane-switching gets worse, not better, because anxiety pushes people to overproduce.

That’s why your job over the next few days is simple: Keep returning to a narrow issue statement. On the MBE, that means you’re answering this question, not the one the distractors are trying to lure you into. On essays, it means you’re writing to the call and the facts, not to your outline.

If you want a one-sentence mindset for exam day, make it this: What is the specific decision this question is asking me to make? Name that decision, stay with it, and let it control what you include and what you leave out.

A horse wins by staying steady, staying controlled, and staying in its lane. Do the same next week. Stay on target, keep your analysis tight, and trust that clarity and focus score.