299: Breaking Down Bar Prep (w/Stephanie Acosta from UWorld/Themis)

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. We would like to thank Themis Bar Review and UWorld for sponsoring this podcast.

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Today we are excited to have Stephanie Acosta, a content director at UWorld, which has acquired Themis Bar Review, joining us to talk more about what these commercial bar prep providers do to create all of the content to help you study for the bar. So Stephanie, thank you for taking time this morning and joining us. I appreciate it.

I was actually the founding member of the legal education vertical at UWorld back in 2017, and that was a really unexpected opportunity that was presented to me by way of my sister volunteering me to meet with the UWorld CEO. So, my sister's actually the head of content development for UWorld's medical education products. And so, around the time when UWorld wanted to move past medical education and be involved with helping students prepare for other high stakes exams,

the bar exam came up and my sister said, "Hey, Stephanie is an attorney. Go talk to her." So, that's how it happened. I volunteered, yeah. But when I met with our CEO, Dr. Chandra Pemmasani, what prompted me to make the very unexpected career change was an opportunity to work in bar review, but for a company that had not been involved in legal education at all, which meant that there was no preconceived notion as to how law should be taught and how our materials should look.

And so that gave me the opportunity to be really creative and really innovative, with truly one goal, which was that I had to make a product that was going to be number one on the market. If he was going to hire me to make the product, I needed to make it the best product out there. So, no pressure. But his just unwavering commitment to wanting a top-of-the-line product, to wanting to have the best content no matter the cost, was really an exciting and unexpected opportunity.

And it's been great that he has remained so true to that commitment. And that's kind of the story that runs through all of the UWorld family, and also into Themis Bar Review.

And so, it's been really interesting to come from a company like UWorld who has its foundation in medical education, but find ways in which a lot of those teaching principles do create opportunities and overlap with the legal education realm. And then certainly it's really fun to have all of the experience and knowledge of Themis Bar Review to join forces with us to create what I think is a really great product that we're all excited about.

And we've had the opportunity to make some really, really cool content enhancements these past five years.

That's amazing." So yeah, I really wasn't looking at bar prep at all, but because of my experience in the appellate world, when I got the opportunity to develop a bar prep product, what was really cool is that a lot of the changes in legal writing that were happening in the appellate field were super applicable to what we needed to do with our bar review content.

For example, in the appellate law practice, that's where we were really thinking about making sure that we're writing in simplistic language and avoiding legalese. There was a movement towards using more simplistic sentences. We were really cognizant of the fact that judges weren't reading briefs on paper anymore. We submit them electronically, they're reading them on their laptops, on their iPads.

And so, when we're dealing with an on-screen reader, they're processing this content and this information differently. And that translates perfectly to what we're seeing with our bar prep students, and our law students as well. They're reading textbooks online more so than ever. They're digesting the majority of their bar review content through a digital platform. And with NextGen, that'll be 100% digital, right? Everything will be online.

And so, it allowed us to take a lot of those writing strategies that kept judges engaged in what it is we were writing in appellate briefs and apply it to the bar review format. So that's why in UWorld and now in Themis, you see us using those shorter sentences, you see us using bullet points in our writing, short paragraphs, strategic bolding, and different things like that to just keep our students engaged and focused on what we're saying.

But also when we're expanding upon the pool of questions that students can use to practice with, we are going to scrutinize those licensed questions and make sure that what we're writing fits seamlessly with the style writing language use that the examiners are using themselves.

The other side of content development is all of the supporting materials that help you learn the law and lawyering skills and exam-taking skills that are going to be needed to successfully answer those questions that you're going to see on exam day. And with those materials, that's where we're really trying to think about, okay, how do we meet our students where they're at?

What do we do with our materials to ensure that they're understandable, easily digestible, and students are able to retain what it is that we're teaching them? And one way I think UWorld has really made a name for itself in this area is through the use of images in our MBE QBank, and having those images in the explanations. And that's a strategy that we're pulling more and more through the Themis Bar Review product, where we have these really great visuals to accompany our lectures now.

And actually come summer, this coming summer, we're going to start having a lot of that imagery show up in some of our outlines too. And so, I'm really excited to see the student responses there. But when we're talking about images, I think it's really easy to think, "Oh, it's just a picture." But really, when I'm talking about images, I'm thinking of something that's much broader than that.

It goes from something that's as simple as a table that can show a compare and contrast of different terminologies, or layout the elements of a cause of action in a different way, or we can go to a flowchart that shows a thought process for legal analyses, or how the Fifth Amendment connects to the Sixth Amendment, a chain of title and timelines for real property. When we think of an image, it's a full-blown illustration.

And it stems, because UWorld started out in medical education, where images just are such a logical connection. Of course you need to know what skin cancer looks like, for example. Of course you need to be able to read an X-ray, and so the incorporation of images in that product was really logical. And so, when I started the MBE QBank, I had a whole team of medical illustrators and graphic designers at my disposal.

And it was like, "Well, why not give it a try and see how we can do that in legal education as well?" And the students' response to that has just been awesome. And it's been so nice to see that as they're starting to digest content and learn through images and be visual learners more and more and more, that we've been able to do our best to evolve our materials and keep up with them, so that we can teach them these concepts in a way that resonates with them.

And so it's like, I'm going to create an image where there's a tiger and a circus guy, and I'm showing how there can be different types of contact in a battery action. And it's actually really wonderful to see how many student comments we get just from that one image that I thought, that's a bit silly. I'm not sure how difficult of a concept it is, but hey, it made them laugh. It was great way for them to remember this principle when it comes to battery.

And while that might have been a simple multiple-choice question, then they remembered to spot that issue when they were going and tackling an essay. And so, it's been really fun to learn about the power of images in our memory and as a teaching tool and that sort thing.

So, stay tuned to this podcast if you want to hear more about it, because we'll be talking about it a lot and have been talking about it a lot. But the NextGen bar exam is really, I think, what is the major change that is coming around the country, and jurisdictions have been adopting it, as a part of its rolling out. Not everybody's going to adopt it in 2026. There still is not a lot of information out there. They have not released everything that they said they were going to release.

And so, there're still a lot of open questions, but we have students in law school right now who are going to end up sitting for this NextGen exam. So, what is UWorld and Themis doing to position itself to help students prepare for the NextGen?

But for those of us who are in the bar review industry, this isn't new to us. I mean, Lee, as you mentioned in California, we just had to adapt to the changes that we learned about for this coming February California exam, with less than six months' notice, and we were able to do that. With the Florida bar exam, Florida's really special, in that they like to roll out changes in the law, even just a week before the exam and test students on it. And we adapt our materials accordingly.

So, I know that when students are sitting here trying to figure out, "Okay, well, is my jurisdiction going NextGen or not?" or, "Hey, I know my jurisdiction's going NextGen and I still feel like I don't know everything" - we get it. But the good news is that we're really experienced when it comes to developing bar prep products. And so, from the moment we heard about NextGen, before we ever saw any sample questions from the NCBE, we said, "You know what? We're going to start

creating this kind of content." Take the integrated question sets, for example, which is a really new testing concept for those of us in legal education. We kind of heard the goals that the NCBE was trying to achieve with this new item type and immediately got to work drafting our own questions.

And what was so cool and what I think really tells the story of our experience is that when we finally saw a sample integrated question set from the NCBE - man, we were pretty darn close with what we had created. And so, we were able to look at that sample and make some really minor tweaks. And we've moved forward with that content development.

So, I know a lot of people in legal education and a lot of your listeners and law students are feeling a bit of anxiety, and that's super normal when we're dealing with something new. But trust in the experience that your legal educators, your teachers, your academic support personnel and bar review providers are bringing to the table. Because while this is a new experience for you, I promise we've got this and we're going to keep you prepared.

I also want to say I think we have a tendency to focus on things that are different and sometimes we forget just how much is actually staying the same with the NextGen exam. If we look at multiple-choice questions, for example, there're some really minor stylistic changes between the current MBE questions and what we're going to see on NextGen, but nothing that should derail students, even those who are used to seeing a standard MBE question.

We're going from a 90-minute MPT to now something that's 60 minutes. It's the exact same skill set. It looks largely the same; it's just a shortened time span. And so, those are things that shouldn't alarm students. And ultimately, the bar exam is still just a baseline understanding of legal skills and legal knowledge, right? And the subject matter outlines aren't changing all that much. In fact, you're going to have to learn less.

And so, I think there are a lot of positive things that should reduce student anxiety as they're confronting these new challenges.

So, what other things have you seen in the bar exam, both with the multiple choice and the essays that you think has changed over the last few years? And has it changed how we ask students to prepare for it?

We're talking about changes in multiple-choice questions, but at the end of the day, multiple-choice questions are still teaching on your ability to issue spot and on your ability to conduct a legal analysis and reach a logical conclusion. And so, I think when we're looking at changes in the bar exam, one thing that does feel a bit reassuring in the tumultuous time starting with COVID, NextGen, California, is that there are still a lot of things that are remaining consistent.

But one thing that I'm really excited about is to see more of these lawyering skills, which I think is what your question was getting at, start to be tested in the bar review realm. And so, I think it's been great that the MPT seems to have always really resonated with the legal community as a fair assessment of what a newly licensed attorney should be able to achieve in a law firm, so it's exciting to see that continue into the NextGen exam.

And it's really cool to see that we're going to have lawyering skills like client counseling, and with integrated questions being able to see sample documents and have questions that are related to those kinds of readings being part of the bar exam as well. And that's just showing how the bar exam and law school in general is being reflective of what we're doing in actual legal practice. So, it's not as though law school's now just based on learning legal doctrine.

There's really been an emphasis on learning these lawyering skills. So, we see ADR becoming a lot more popular, and there're a lot more competitions for moot court, going back to that mock trial, client counseling, alternative dispute resolution, negotiations. And then also even more clinics and things like that that are giving students real world legal experiences.

And so, I'm really excited to see that show up more so on the exam, and to have questions that are placing students in the role of the attorney. I think that actually is going to feel like a much more logical testing process and a more natural testing process than what we're seeing with the current bar exam today.

So, turning to self- assessments first, what I mean by that is, there really is a difference in answering quickly 200 questions and moving on, versus answering 100 questions and going through to see if you understand, "Why did I get it right, and did I actually understand why every alternative answer choice was wrong?" There's a big difference in writing answers to five essays, versus writing out three essays and actually going through the outlines and the

sample answers provided and seeing, was your writing clear and concise? Did I use IRAC? Did I spot all of the issues? Are they presented in a logical way? How could I have improved upon what I did? There's a lot of known power in taking that time to do self- assessment and taking ownership over, not just going through the practice, but synthesizing the results, that is really going to elevate your studying.

And then moving to study strategies, I think that there's a big tendency for law students to doubt themselves in what it is they should be doing when it comes to studying for the bar exam. But by the time we're studying, we should all be pros at knowing what it is we need to do to succeed on a test. We'll see students who say, "Yeah, I just spent four hours trying to read the long outline and I can't remember a single thing." Well, okay.

Did you just read and remember and succeed in law school, or did you make your own flashcards? Did you find a way to summarize what you were reading into textbooks into a condensed outline in some way? What did you do there so that you were prepared for your final exam? Because those are the exact same things that you should be doing when it comes to bar review.

So while my job is to give you as many tools as possible to study, I want to give my visual learners a lecture to look at, or my auditory learners something to listen to, I want to give my visual learners pictures and texts to read, my active learners or kinetic learners the ability to make their own flashcards or make their own outlines.

But it's really up to the individual student to know what study strategies work best for them and apply that to the tools, and use the tools effectively in how we think of them, and how we have given them in bar review.

And I do think that some students get to the bar and they are not well versed in memorizing material. They may be able to outline, they may be able to reference, but they are not used to that heavy level of memorization. And so, I know for my students, I do go back to this idea that you have to be constantly giving yourself assessments to see if the time that you're putting in has a return on investment. And so, if you're making flashcards... I made this mistake when I was studying for the bar.

I hate flashcards. I don't know why I thought I had to make flashcards for the bar. That was a terrible choice. I made them and then didn't use them, and then realized that I was just wasting time. And I had had closed-book exams in law school, I did have an idea of how to do them, but I still wasted a bunch of time, because everybody was making flashcards and I thought that was what you were supposed to do.

So, the way that you find out whether or not that is something you're supposed to do, is to study it, and then do questions, and if you don't know the law, then that's not the way you should be studying. So, even if you don't have a lot of experience memorizing huge, massive amounts of law in law school, by being very honest with yourself and doing those testing assessments throughout, you're going to get that information. I think one of the challenges is, it feels really crummy to do that.

Nobody enjoys testing themselves in that way, because it makes you feel uncomfortable, it's highlighting where your weak areas are, it can be hard on your mental state. You have to really be in a growth mindset. But if you don't do that, you're not getting any feedback about whether the time you're putting in is useful or not. And I think that that is hard.

If your law school didn't train you in that, then you need to make sure that that assessment piece is even more critical during your bar prep.

What I will say is even with an open-book exam... And I share your views in that regard, because even as practicing attorneys, you're still expected to be able to issue spot, and so you have to have some level of general familiarity with the law to represent your client and to think through the story that they're telling them and think of ways in which you can solve that problem. And so, I think it is important to have a baseline knowledge of memory retention.

But what I will say is this: You're never going to pass a final exam if you're relying on a book to read through the materials and understand them for the first time. So, even if you are not focused on rote memorization for your final exam, you are still involved in that learning process. If you learn best by reading through the cases and going through the process of outlining and synthesizing on your own, then do that when you're reading the long outline in bar review.

If you learn best by recording your law professor, if they let you, and listening to that audio on repeat, then, hey, do the same thing when you're listening to a video lecture in bar review. I think there're still a lot of things that you can take from your academic experiences that will be applicable to your studying when it comes to the bar exam.

So, what are your recommendations of how they can best utilize the tools to get past this point of feeling stuck and that they're not going to be prepared?

It's at the beginning of bar prep and I'm refreshing my memory, then certainly I'm going to see my performance on multiple-choice questions, which is what we typically start with in bar prep, start pretty low and then quickly grow as my memory is refreshed on these concepts that I'm trying to wipe the cobwebs off.

It's normal when we hit July, or late January for February takers, to hit a plateau to where we've gotten rid of all of those cobwebs, and so now we're not seeing as big of gains in our performance. That plateau is totally normal. So if that's what's happening to you, don't freak out. That's exactly what should be happening.

And now what you're really doing is figuring out how you can get just small gains as you're focusing on the areas that aren't coming as quickly to you and that are a little bit more tricky. So, first thing, deep breath, recognize this as normal. But also, there might actually be an issue, so think critically about that as well.

If you're seeing a dramatic decline, for example, in your practice question percentages and things like that, then you have to take a step back and think about, why is that? So, to use weightlifting to move away from our marathon training metaphor that we always use. If you're lifting weights, and you're trying to learn how to squat and get a 200-pound squat, let's say, it's really normal for people to plateau when they hit 150 pounds, let's pretend. And so, you can look at your nutrition.

Maybe what you need to do is to drop the weight that you've been lifting and do it in higher reps. Maybe it's that you need to do less reps with a higher weight, and that's how you're going to move past it. Maybe you need to try a different exercise - not just doing squats, but try doing lunges. Those are different strategies that you can use to kind of get over that plateau. And it's an analogy that's applicable to bar prep too.

I had my schlump and I think for me, it just ended up being burnout. And really what I was doing is I was so focused on answering questions nonstop and constantly studying that my brain just went into a complete fog. And so, for me, what I actually needed to do was just sit down and say, "Okay, you cannot study for 16 hours a day. It is not healthy for you to be on your app answering multiple-choice questions up until 2:00 AM.

You're just burnt out." And so, what I needed to do was kind of rein back on my studying and make sure that I was giving myself some space to invest in my mental health, to exercise, for example, to take a break to eat lunch, so that my brain could continue to be actively engaged. I think, to give some more practical advice to our listeners, if you're going through the plateau, take a deep breath.

If you are identifying that there's a problem, then this is a great time to start thinking about how you might change some of your strategies. Talk to some friends and get advice on what they might be doing and things that might resonate for you and your practice a bit more.

But then go back to your assessments, like we were talking about earlier, and say, "Okay, I'm plateauing, but am I seeing things dip?

Are the gain slowing, or am I not able to answer these questions?" And I think that if the answer is, "I'm not able to answer the questions", it's not just that I've plateaued, then it's time to put on the brakes and triage and come up with a different plan, because you may not be retaining information, or your flashcards may not be working for you, or whatever it might be. So, it's a great time to say, "Okay, let's take some honest looks at

what's going well and what's not going well." And if you need to pivot, you still have time usually to pivot. But if you're just saying, "Oh, I'm plateauing and everyone else is at the library for 14 hours"... It's possible I had this conversation with my now husband when I said, "But everybody's doing this", and he's like, "You didn't study that way in law school. Why would you study that way now?" And I was like, "Oh, that's a very good

point." It's wise to have people who are not lawyers or have not studied for this test in your life to call you on silly comments that you may make out of anxiety. But I do think that going back to those assessments and asking yourself, "I am putting in this study time. Do I have a recall of this information?" One of the things I talk about with students a lot is like, "Let's just talk about evidence.

Can you list off all the hearsay exceptions and give me a simple rule statement for all of them?" If the answer is "no", then you need to look at how you're studying. That's kind of a baseline knowledge. It's heavily tested, everybody should have those skills. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you pretty much have to know that stuff. And so, if you're not able to do that, then you need to put "Pause" on and say, "Okay, now what do I do?

Because I need to start learning the law in a different way and applying it to fact patterns to make sure that I can do the job and not just passively let the information wash over me." Which feels great in the moment, because you're like, "Oh, I'm so smart. I'm watching these videos and I've learned so much." Until I ask a very pointed question and somebody can't answer it.

But if then what you do with those flashcards is just read the front and flip and read the back - well, that's passive learning. That's not an effective use of the flashcards. So just to go back to this example, if you're reflecting on your studying and you're going, "Well, I've made these outlines and I've made these flashcards, but I'm just not retaining the knowledge" - then check and see and think, how are you actually engaging with those materials?

If it's purely just reading, then think about talking about it out loud, and getting a friend to quiz you on the flashcards, so that you're not just flipping it over and passively reading it. Or I'm a whiteboard fan, and so thank you, California, for implementing that. But for me with flashcards, I would write out the answer on a whiteboard, because just something about the mechanics of writing just helped with my memory retention. And so, that was an effective way to utilize flashcards for me.

I love when we can have a positive environment of information sharing and different study practices and things like that, so that you can think of, "Okay, well, maybe I'm not actually utilizing a flashcard in a meaningful way and maybe somebody else has a better way of learning how to use that tool."

I won't do that to you. But the idea is, that's great legal trivia. You get an MBE question that's on a dying declaration and it's great to just know that. But I think so often in the essays, you also need to know how the law is structured and fits together.

You do need to be able to make a whole list of those hearsay exceptions, because you might get a fact pattern where you in your head need to be like, "Is it this, is it this, is it this, is it this?" That's the attack plan or checklist, everybody's got a different name for it. But you don't want to lose the forest through the trees. You need to understand how the law fits together, so you can thoughtfully think through the law as you're issue spotting.

And so I think that's another thing that often gets lost in the flashcard discussion, is that legal trivia is great, but you also need to understand how all that law fits together.

And even though California calls these "hearsay exceptions", I'm going to use hearsay exclusions or non-hearsay. It's fine, no judgment.

And then think about, who made the statement? And under what circumstances was that statement made? And if we're looking at hearsay exceptions, then why do these exceptions make sense? So that maybe we're not just relying on rote memorization, but also just using our own legal intuition, right? And so, these hearsay exceptions are often turning around circumstances in which we should inherently be able to trust the truthfulness of the statement.

So if somebody is dying and muttering, "Lee is the one who stabbed me" - well, chances are I'm telling the truth in the moment of my death that you are the one who stabbed me, right? So, it seems logical that even though I might not be able to go and testify in court as to that statement, that perhaps that utterance should still be admissible because of the circumstances under which it was made. And so, there're a lot of tools that we can use to think about how we can present this information.

And those are the kinds of things that as a content developer, I'm trying to show students not just the brick, but also the entire wall or the entire building on how they can piece this together.

And when I was initially starting to study, what was really challenging for me was hearing from my peers, "Well, why didn't you delete your social media? What do you mean you've only gone through this percentage of the course? Well, why didn't you go and buy all of these additional supplemental products?

We didn't see you in the library." Those criticisms were just not helpful for me, and so I very quickly learned that that's not what I needed to listen to, that I needed to surround myself with a positive peer group that was going to lift me up and encourage me, and not compare what they're doing to what I'm doing, and to have a good support system.

But the biggest thing was making sure that I was staying in tune with my own mental health and making sure that yes, I'm able to get through my bar review materials, I'm staying on track with my course, but that I'm also not just panic-answering questions. My poor husband had to listen to the bar review lectures playing in my car anytime we drive somewhere, because I was convinced that was wasted time and I had to make it beneficial in some way. Oh my goodness. And you know what?

A 10-minute car ride to the grocery store was not going to make me fail the bar exam. And so, give yourself permission. Please give yourself permission to treat bar prep like a full-time job. Do not let it consume your life. And put reasonable parameters around your studying.

And remember, with our special promotion, you can access Themis' resources at an unbelievable value. Save $700 on any July 2025 Themis Bar Review course using the code BAREXAMTB700 at checkout, now valid through April 1st, 2025. 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're still in law school, you might also like to check out our popular Law School Toolbox podcast as well. 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!