Welcome to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. Today we are sharing part two of our conversation with Jennifer Barry, a tutor on our Bar Exam Toolbox team who's a former bar grader. Your Bar Exam Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the bar exam experience, so you can study effectively, stay sane, and hopefully pass and move on with your life.
We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website CareerDicta. Alison also runs The Girl's Guide to Law School. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on your favorite listening app, and check out our sister podcast, the Law School Toolbox podcast. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us via the contact form on BarExamToolbox.com, and we'd love to hear from you. And with that, let's get started.
Welcome back! Today we are welcoming Jennifer Barry, a member of the Law School Toolbox and Bar Exam Toolbox team, who is sharing some insights from her time as a bar exam grader. We've talked about some of these common mistakes already that folks make not using IRAC, or if you're studying for the UBE, it could be CREAC; not making it easy to read - so, not having clean headers, not using organization, not making it easy to see those rule statements.
What are some other common mistakes that examinees make? And one specifically is how big of a deal are the typos? Because a lot of people get really stressed out about the typos.
Typos are not a big deal at all. Honestly, don't even be caught up in whether or not your exam is going to have typos, because you're writing three essays in one hour, or you're writing two essays and a performance test in two and a half, three hours, three and a half hours?
It's now three and a half. Yes, I know. Hard to keep track.
Sorry.
That's alright.
It's all been changed since when I was doing
this. Yes.
So, l'm still sort of getting readjusted to that one, but anyway, you're going to have typos because of the nature of what you're doing. I got to a point when I was grading that I got so good at reading I still to this day have to be like, "Don't read over that. You have to be more careful." For me, I was just reading right past the spelling error, even grammatical errors, unless your sentence just like doesn't make any sense at all. I would read what I thought you meant to say, essentially.
It's not really typos; it's really handwriting and clarity. That's the one place I think that students or test takers really need to be mindful of, is if you're either handwriting by choice or if you have the unfortunate technological difficulties and you have to switch to handwriting, that even though you're under this massive time pressure, you have to be really careful about how clear your writing is.
The handwriting ones were my least favorite most of the time, because they typically were not clear, they weren't easy to read, and so I had to spend a lot of time, often more time than the actual time required to give the grade, then to be able to read through and decipher what people were trying to say. And there were at least a couple of years that I had to return to the bar and say, "I can't. I've tried and I just can't figure out this person's handwriting.
See if somebody else can catch it." The issue there, obviously, is you are under this time crunch, so your hands are getting tired, your handwriting becomes less and less clear. But you have to really think about trying to make it as clear as possible, so that you get your points.
I often have this conversation with students who want to handwrite, because even if you are a slow typist - and I realize that not everyone is a fast typist the first question I ask people is like, "Can you really handwrite more than you can type?" And the answer is really almost for everyone "no", because handwriting is super slow. It has a value. We talk with our law students, right?
You have higher retention from it, and there are lots of reasons why you want to use handwriting, but the things that make it good for that don't really make it good for this. And it's just so hard. It is hard, and we don't all handwrite that much anymore. My handwriting is way worse than it used to be, because I don't do it as much.
I don't even do the handwriting at this point, no. I
know, right? I keep a notepad by my desk and it looks garbagey. I mean, I don't know. I think folks really have to sit with that and get in the mind of the grader, again, and say, "Is this going to be a good representation of my work?" And if you're really not sure, then maybe you should have a family member try and read it. Or have somebody else read one of your practice questions and see if they are able to skim it.
Because I think the thing is, you're not supposed to be going word for word with the pen doing this. You're reading quickly, and someone needs to be able to read quickly. So, I think it is something folks really need to be honest with themselves about, even though I know that some people really are attached to it, because it does make it harder in some ways.
Yeah. I mean, there were some people whose handwriting was amazing and clear, and I was like, "Did you spend your entire time writing this one because your handwriting is amazing, and I can read every moment of it?" But then, the majority of the handwritten ones, it starts out very clear, and then trails to just lines in the length of the words. It's not doing yourself any favors if that's the likelihood of how your handwriting is going to go.
And like you said, I think you need to be honest with yourself about that, just because you are robbing yourself of points, of a score if your handwriting isn't legible. So that's one thing substantively with common errors.
The biggest thing is not following the call of the question closely, not reading it carefully, because sometimes there're hidden calls within a three-part question and you have to read the actual paragraph in the essay to actually understand what the call of the question means. And so, if you don't slow down and carefully examine what the call is asking you, you might end up down the wrong path. And then again, you're robbing yourself of valuable points because we can't...
The graders cannot give you points. I keep saying "we", I'm not a grader anymore.
That's okay. Yeah, you couldn't work for us and also be a bar grader. I
could not be doing this right now. But as a grader, I could not, and they currently cannot give you points for something that's not called for. Even what you said was perfectly right, if you misunderstood the question, that can be a problem too. And it's almost like a little bit, at least for me, because I'm sort of an empathetic person - it's very heartbreaking for me as I read this. I'm like, "Oh, I know what you're talking about. It's just wrong." So, that's a big one.
I don't think that this is necessarily a score killer, but it again goes back to making your grader's job easier, and this is also just following the logical order of the question, especially if they give you three calls, or two calls and one has two subheadings or two subcalls. Don't answer them in a random order. You should answer them order that it's provided to you, because your grader's expecting that.
And it will get confusing to your grader if you randomly start talking about Question 1 in the middle of where Question 3 should be or something.
Right. Or if you're in Trusts and Estates and they give you five people in a list, typically they want those five people in that list.
In the order they've presented it to you, or in logical date order, things like that, because otherwise, again, your grader's having to do a lot of digging to try to find what you're saying. And that may or may not hurt your score, because there's also an overall feeling score too.
So if you get to the end of a question, and for me, if I got to the end and I looked at my grade points and I said, "Well, this is 55, but this question definitely was minimum of 60" - I'm going to give them a 60 because my gut says this was a 60. But you might not get that if you start hiding the ball, as they would say about a course professor. So, that was a lot of the question- focused ones.
And then the biggest thing I think that is hard for students and examinees to accept is, if they tell you something is valid - oh my gosh, it's valid.
It's true. That contract is valid. It is just valid.
Don't spend any time analyzing whether the contract is valid. They told you it was valid. You just wasted precious time. And you'll see so many where it literally said they entered into a valid fee arrangement. And then there would be a page of an analysis of whether it was a valid fee arrangement.
Well, you don't have any information about it, other than valid, so you're making things up, and you've just wasted all of that time, because you had in your mind, "In theory, in this question, I have to talk about rules." But they told you that, so you wouldn't talk about it.
Oh my gosh, it comes up all the time. The one that would always get me was on a performance test, when they would say, "Don't include a statement of facts", and then students would include a statement of facts. Every time. And I'm like, they literally said, " Don't." "I told
you not to do it. Why are you doing it?" One,
I told you not to do it, so you couldn't follow the directions. And two, you wasted so much time, and there's no time to be wasted. So, you have to believe them. The bar is not trying to trick you with the question.
I think that's part of it. There are some tricky questions,
sure. Sure, of course. There
are ones where if you didn't catch this nuance in the fact, you won't get the actual analysis fully correct. But they're never trying to trick you in that way of saying it's valid, and then they want you to talk about it. That's just not something they do in the process. I think that the thing to take on the performance test too, to your point, part of it is to see are you going to be a good lawyer, right? Do you know how to follow directions that somebody gave you?
Because that's part of this whole process, right? So, if you do something that is not what they told you to do, then it does indicate that maybe you're not quite there yet.
Exactly, yeah. And I tell you, if a judge tells you not to include something, don't include it.
You better not include it. right? it
That's not going to go well. So, you mentioned that people will write messages in their answers and say that they're running out of time or that they're having a bad day. Did anyone write anything to make you laugh? Were you feeling bad? It never really occurred to me that people are writing messages to the graders in their essays. I definitely did not do that on my bar.
Yeah, no. So, there always would be a handful of essays that had something funny in them - either funny because something that the student said in their statements was just kind of off the wall, or funny because they were intentionally trying to make a joke. There was always that kind of thing here and there, and then we did see things like, "I'm running out of time" or, "Ran out, sorry."
Typically the bar would cover up those, white them out or block them out, most of the time, especially I think I had commented to you during one of the examinations that I did, I can't remember what year it was, but there were people who wrote like, " Earthquake!" in their essays, and the bar went through and deleted that anywhere that it appeared. And if it did appear, we were not supposed to pay any attention to it. That sort of thing shouldn't affect your grade at all.
But I do think that if you made me laugh intentionally, certainly that gut at the end might have been leaning slightly more towards
right. If it was a tie, then at least you got a little bonus. It
was kind of funny, yeah. And I did enjoy it. I know when I took the bar, I did not do this, but I know a couple of the people that I forget what word it was that they wanted to work into every essay, but they worked a particular word or phrase into every single essay, which is such a weird thing to do on this exam that's our entire life. Okay, have fun. But people do that kind of stuff, and I guess whatever it takes to make this not a horrible experience.
Yeah, you've got to do what you've got to do.
I would write down the funny ones and take them back to our third meetings to be like, "Hey guys, you want to hear this?"
You've got to have something to entertain you when you're reading the same questions
over and over. Exactly, the same thing over and over.
Yeah, exactly. Well, you graded the bar for a good chunk of years. We know the California bar has some changes coming, although we're not going to spend time talking about that, because we have a whole another podcast coming out on that. And I don't even know what to say, so we'll just lay it to the side.
So, did you see while you were grading and now that you have also just been around this test for so long, do you think that the test or the answers themselves have been changing over time naturally, even before possible changes to the test?
I was looking back earlier, pre the July this year exam, and just looking at some of the older questions, and some of them that were very long and very full of information, hard for a student or an exam taker to sort of parse through in an hour. And it does seem like there is a little bit of movement towards questions that aren't so long, that are just a little bit more straightforward. They might bring in more law, more rules, but they may give you less stuff to work with.
That was one thing that I kind of noticed in the differences. And I had gone through to remind myself since it had been a minute since I had thought about or I graded to see, what did I do all those years? And there were significant differences, even from July 2006. I stopped in 2017, but I stopped actually grading in about 2014, and there were differences between those as well, in terms of the types of questions. And I think that there's a mix of reasons that could be.
It could be just where they were sourcing their questions from initially in the beginning, versus where they were towards the decade later. And then it could also be the feedback over the testing period, when they would be developing a question for a test. It was one of the things I did as well - I would actually go take the test and give feedback, like, "This wasn't clear", "I hated this question", things like that.
Yeah, I remember on my bar, question number 3 in the morning session was a full page fact pattern. And I'm too much of a control freak, so I had to glance at all three of the questions to know what was coming. Number 1 I think was professional responsibility and it was like a nice half page fact pattern, and then the next one came and I was like, "Okay". And then the third one I was like, "What is this?", because it was like single space the entire Yeah
it's like continued on next.
Yeah, you're like, "What is happening? Why is this so long?" Yeah, so I also agree. I have watched that kind of cycle out, and I think that's nice, because it does take a long time to even just read one of those fact patterns and trying to keep track of it. And you can get the curve without a full page fact pattern. That's the reality, right? So, they don't need that.
Yeah. I think that you can easily test a lot of different rules with carefully worded one or two-sentence fact pattern. Whereas, those long ones are trying to touch on a lot of rules, and they are, but now you only have like one or two facts that can go for every rule that they're touching on, and it becomes very difficult for, I think, the test takers to actually keep track.
My preference is those shorter, less facts but more potential rules, that be brought up with those facts than intensive ones. But your story reminded me there was one other thing I wanted to mention about mistakes I saw a lot, and
yes.
I think that test takers need to be careful about. And that is not necessarily always answering your strongest subject first, or the one that seems the easiest. Being careful about the order in which you answer these three question, because as a grader, I graded questions that were at any number of different places in the exam. There would be the first day, first question, or last day, last question.
And you could often tell this essay where somebody left at the very end, and it's because they hate this subject and they don't feel confident on it and they ran out of time or it's rushed. But you could also tell the ones that were like, "Oh, this is my best subject, and I am going to just kill this one." And they wrote and they wrote forever and they probably scored amazing on my essay, and then they likely took too much time and didn't do so well on the other two.
And so, you've got to find that balance. That's one the things that I kind of wanted to reiterate that I know people are told, but again, from a grader perspective, you can often tell what happened, what was going on with these guys.
Yeah. And if you bomb that last question, it mathematically does not work out. It doesn't work out to do that. And I think that it really drives me crazy when students get lulled into that idea, because you could steal a couple of minutes from an essay - I definitely did that on my personal exam. And if you're like, "Oh well, this is a meteor one. I'm going to steal like two minutes." But it's got to be like two minutes, not 15 minutes.
Right. You can't get carried away just typing. And on the same vein, if it is something you know everything about, you do not actually need to tell me everything about because that's not relevant. What's relevant is what's in the question call.
And going back to the making the grader's job easier - reading a treatise is not easy. So, that's not making your job any easier.
Exactly. You do have to then sort through, like, "Okay, this giant paragraph about the history of courts, is there anything in this paragraph that is actually pointable? Can I actually give five points to any of this?" So again, it goes back to not taking time from yourself, not taking points from yourself. This is your exam, so do yourself the best favors.
Yeah. Well, we're almost out of time, but I thought about one other question that I know concerns people. If you are taking the exam and you get extended time or any sort of accommodation, the graders do not know that, right?
No knowledge whatsoever. It is double-blind in every way. Basically, you are given your examinee number and they then randomize that onto another number, and we would never see. The books that we get are numbered again. It's like three numbers away, so we never have any way of knowing anything about you. And there should be nothing identifying in your exam. They screen it to make sure that if you wrote something, it's blocked out, it's not visible to the grader.
So, they make sure that everything is double-blind. And similarly with if you ever get a second or third read. So, they make sure that this is as anonymous as possible.
I think that's just really important, because I have heard bar takers say that they don't want to get accommodations because they feel like it is going to reflect badly. And that is not how accommodations work for the bar. And it is what is used to level the playing field. So, I'm really passionate about students getting access to the accommodations that they need. And I just wanted to make sure that everyone knows that nobody knows. going Yeah, there's
no way for the grader to know. And if you need a little extra time for whatever reason, you should take it. There's zero reason why you should make this harder on yourself than it absolutely needs to be. This is already hard enough.
A hundred percent. Well, what final advice would you like bar takers out there to take away from our conversation today?
Well, I think that the bar exam is a hard thing to deal with. It's emotionally grueling, it's physically grueling, even though you're just sitting and typing. And just go into it with the confidence that you got through law school, you know your stuff, you went through the crazy studying period, which when you look at these schedules after the fact, it's insane. And you're prepared. It's just a matter of practicing it enough that you're able to show somebody else this stuff, and you can do it.
I feel like I'm always very positive in this realm of, "I know you can do it. I don't know you, but I know you can do it."
Yeah, I agree. Well, thanks so much, Jennifer. What great insights. And I'm glad that you are now helping people pass, and not just having to blindly grade mountains and mountains of essays. And I appreciate your time. Thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
And with that, we’re out of time. If you enjoyed this episode of the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast, please take a second to leave a review and rating on your favorite listening app. We'd really appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Alison at lee@barexamtoolbox.com or alison@barexamtoolbox.com. Or you can always contact us via our website contact form at BarExamToolbox.com.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon!