Bar Prep With Themis – Advice from a 289 Scorer

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Now Officially a Lawyer

All opinions are my own and have not been shared with or examined by Themis or the NCBE, or any affiliated entities.

I sat for the July 2024 bar exam, and my state required a 266 to pass. I scored a 289, with a 147 in the essays and a 141 on the MBE (I assume the curve made up the extra point). I completed 66% of the Themis course and about 1200 UWorld questions, and actually took almost the entire week off before the bar exam because of an unexpected family emergency, save for some outline-reading the day before. The exam was administered on July 30 and 31st, so the suggested start date for that summer was May 20 (if I remember correctly). I was employed during my bar prep time, but have a very considerate employer who gave me far more than enough flexibility to bar prep as needed with minimal workload.

I realize this is a pretty far outlier for a passing-the-bar story, but I chalk it up to the fundamentals of studying, execution and reverse-engineering the bar that I developed over the summer, which I’m about to spill for you.

(cue Amiibo Lawyer joke)

What to Know Before You Begin

How to Feel About It

I want to make something clear: though I don’t recall exactly what my GPA was, my impression was that I was not in the top half of my T40 law school class. (Once I noticed that law school has no similarity to the real-world practice I received during internships, I focused more on career development instead of academics – and I have my dream job because of it.) Your law school GPA has absolutely nothing to do with your performance on the bar exam. I know that in law school (and the legal profession as a whole) there’s a lot of insecurity and peepee-measuring about who’s smarter, who has the better GPA, who went to the better undergrad, etc. None of that “pattern of professional success” stuff is relevant here. In fact, there were many concepts in the 1L “bar prep” classes that I didn’t fully understand until I actually bar prepped, and you’ll likely find that you’re learning a lot of material for the first time as well. Probably the only things that I actually learned in law school that helped me on the bar exam were my Civil Procedure knowledge, Hearsay and Torts, and that’s because those rules are mostly uniform in all jurisdictions.

You should be going into this like it’s a long-term trivia game: learn the nuggets and frameworks of law, grind out the assignments, review what you did right and wrong and adjust your methods, and use Themis just as a treadmill to point you in the direction of what to do next. This is especially important for the essays, which we’ll cover later.

Most of all, remember: it’s painful, but it’s not personal, and there’s a very wide array of career options available to you no matter how this exam turns out. You’re going to be okay.

What About Taking a Break?

The decision to take a break isn’t a decision. You have to take a break periodically over the course of your bar prep. You should stop your work when one of these conditions are met:

1. When your work is done for the day (ideally at 5 PM)
2. One day a week, typically Sunday (yes, even the Sunday before the exam)
3. One morning or afternoon per week, beginning or ending at noon

You’re not going to be able to shake off all the stress of having the bar exam looming over you during your break times (especially if you caffeinate even on days off, as caffeine likely stresses you out more than you realize), but you will be able to use that time to shake off the stress of everything else. Do your dishes and laundry. Hit the gym. Send those emails you need to send. Get a proper night’s sleep. Anything that’s stressing you out besides the exam is going to be accomplished during the non-exam times so you can keep those halves of the world separate.

The week before the exam shouldn’t feature any differentiation in your breaks schedule. If anything, the break you take on the Sunday before the exam should look like a productive Sunday where you’re taking care of everything besides the bar exam that could come to mind over the next week.

How the Bar Exam Curve (Probably) Works

During my more panicked days of studying I did a lot of procrastination research on what bar graders said about how the bar is graded, and this is probably how it goes:

1. The MPT and MEE essays are individually graded, and each jurisdiction’s graders convene to create criteria for how to grade each problem. MEE 1 will have a different grading structure than MEE 2, for example, because the graders noticed that more students knew the rule for MEE 1 than MEE 2.
2. The essays are then graded by the jurisdiction, placed on a curve (the exact curve is different with each jurisdiction – some require the same number of 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. while some use a bell curve) and the curved essay scores are sent to the NCBE.
3. Meanwhile, the MBE scores went straight to the NCBE.
4. Once the essay scores are in, the NCBE combines the essay scores and MBE scores to get the “raw” score for the test taker. They then place all those scores on a national average curve where only 60% of test takers actually pass the exam.

Basically, it’s a loooot of curving. This is law school finals on steroids, man.

Now We Begin

Your first few weeks will actually be fun, because Themis is teaching you the law the way that you want to be taught the law: as a long list of interconnected rules with no case names or professors to plug you up. You’ll probably start with Contracts, which is a fairly complicated topic, and then move to Torts and Property. (Each period has its own schedule, check yours.)

As I said above, if Themis gives you less than 8 hours of work, do 8 hours anyway by making use of the Flex Study options. I guarantee you that you’ll fall behind after the first week, so don’t sweat whether you’re “behind” or not. Just do the 8 hours, do them solidly, and leave it behind when your 8 hours + 1 hour for lunch are done. Don’t do more than 8 hours in a given day, as you’ll just wear yourself out.

The Structure of Themis and How to Operate With It

Themis tends to operate like so:

1. Start on a new topic by reading the outline and then filling in the lecture handouts by watching the video lectures, and then having you do a few MBE or MEE tasks.
2. Move to a new topic while having you do the MBE or MEE tasks. Most of the summer will be spent having you working on watching lectures for a new topic while doing problems with the last topic.
3. Towards the last three weeks of the summer, once you have covered the final topics (which were Agency, Partnerships, Corporations for me) Themis will have you grind out MBEs and MEEs, and probably suggest that you do UWorld questions but not place them in your daily activities.
4. The way you learn with Themis is not by taking the knowledge it gives you in the video lectures and using it in the MBE and MEE tasks. It teaches you by having you do them and get them wrong despite the knowledge you just obtained. The pop psychology behind this is that you only really learn from pain, so it makes you feel kinda bad by getting stuff wrong so you remember the additional piece of information you didn’t know. This works great when studying for the bar! The downside is that you spend all day every day getting emotionally beaten up.

I have one small tweak to this process. Don’t read the outline first and then the lecture handouts, do the lecture handouts first and then read the outline the first thing next day. That way you know which topics you should look for (because they were covered in the lectures) and which ones don’t need your attention that much, and you’re still fresh in the morning.

I debated back and forth the entire summer about whether to skip any of the video lectures, and ultimately decided not to. If you’re going to skip video lectures, skip over the lectures for some of your more familiar MEE topics (especially Secured Transactions, as it’s the same MEE question every time) as they’re not as law-intense as the MBE topics, you already know them and can be easily flashcarded.

Aside from this, let Themis tell you what to do next! That what it’s there for, and it does a good job at it.

Tracking Progress and Planning

Themis assigns a percentage completion value to (nearly) every task you complete, and that value is not weighted to the time taken to complete it or the effort you put in. It’s a back-asswards system, where watching 9 hours of Property videos in one day grants you 0.3% completion but whizzing through an MEE in 20 minutes grants you 0.4% completion.

Themis says that once you complete “75%” of the course then your likelihood of passing goes significantly up. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological science to it, but you really should be ignoring the percentage that Themis assigns you and focus on completing the work. Seriously. Don’t even check it. As long as you’re putting in 5 and a half solid 8-hour days each week, you’re doing fine. Don’t put in 5 12-hour days, or all-nighters, or anything else: Themis is best treated as a treadmill that only moves for up to 8 hours in a day, plus an hour for lunch where you’re not thinking about the bar exam. Just make sure those 8 hours are spent productively, and not procrastinatively.

I want to reiterate the importance of having a “solid” 8 hour day. That means no distractions, with full focus the entire time. You’re not procrastinating, opening other tabs on your computer, playing music in the background. The only stimuli is the bar exam, and it’s that way for 8 hours. That’s how you make those 8 hours effective.

MBE Practice

As a general rule of thumb, you’ll score about 15% higher on the bar exam MBE than you will in your Themis-created MBE studies (I recommend using each topic’s third MBE practice questionnaire as your metric, as the fourth and fifth ones contain really niche points of law that often don’t get brought up again and I don’t believe were equivalent to the level of difficulty on the bar itself). When doing the MBE Practice and, later in the summer, the UWorld practices, your best strategy is to actually sit and read through the entire explanation of why you got it right or wrong for every question.

What you’ll realize is that MBE questions tend to all follow a factual pattern depending on the rules that are relevant (though the Themis-invented ones are a lot more unnecessarily complicated than the actual bar exam ones). For example, you’ll spot that Contracts questions that hinge on whether the transaction is in UCC or common law territory often have facts that indicate there’s a dispute towards something like this. It may be a pattern where the good could conceivably be a service paid (such as a dentist putting in gold fillings) or could conceivably be a sold good (the gold fillings itself), at which point you’d need to know the rule to differentiate between them and make your analysis. It sounds weird, but come back to this paragraph once you’ve done a few sets of Contracts MBE questions and you’ll see what I mean: the facts are often set up to “tickle” a rule in your mind.

The bad news is that while you’re working on building that understanding, the Themis-invented questions and some of the older UWorld bar questions are often up to subjective judgment calls instead of objective rules-based analysis. This is where the bar exam itself is flawed: the law by nature is open to argument, and the exam is testing for objectivity on subjective arguments. Still, we truck on and do our best. Just know that if you feel like a question could go either way, it probably could, but so long as you knew the relevant rules you’ll be fine. The modern MBE questions tend to be pretty straightforward and to not have as much of a gray area as the old ones in my opinion.

UWorld Practice

Make use of UWorld only in the last three weeks, because half the bar exam is the multiple choice questions and 20% of the rest isn’t something you can really study for (though you should incorporate regular MPT exercise into your routine), so it’s best to have the multiple choice freshest in your head. I recommend doing about a thousand UWorld questions in the three weeks preceding the bar exam. That’s about three 100-question slog sessions a week, which should take you about three hours depending on your jurisdiction. I never said it was fun.

Be warned: after you hit the first couple hundred UWorld questions, your correctness percentage will crash. I wasn’t able to get above a 50% correct on UWorld two weeks before the bar exam, and it was a massive emotional hit. That is by design. UWorld hits you with the most commonly-tested topics at first and you get those right way more than you get everything else right, so as you get into the niche stuff you’re not going to get them right as much. Shrug it off. It just means that you’ve learned everything beforehand really well, and they’re having to dig into the obscure material now.

Essay Practice

Themis packages typically include “graded” essays, in which a practicing attorney will grade your MEE response or MPT response as if it’s a real essay. Having read other people’s opinions on the internet, most people seem to believe that the essays aren’t even actually graded or that the feedback is largely unhelpful. I fully agree – don’t check the point grade that Themis gives you, just the written feedback, and don’t take into consideration any of the written feedback that relates to making your writing sound pretty. I scored a 1 across the board in nearly every Themis graded essay I got, save for the Civ Pro one where I copy-pasted the exact rules into the exam and still only received a 4 out of 6. Yet my written score came out to a 147 out of 200, which is an average of between 4 to 5 points for each MEE (assuming I received an average score on the MPT). As best as I can tell, there’s no correlation between the points Themis graders give and the points you receive on the actual exam.

Therefore…

The only valid reference for what an MEE should absolutely look like is the official NCBEX website.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how to format them, I made it a point to copy the formatting I saw in the official NCBEX responses as best I could, and adapted it to my own style for the bar exam. Your MEEs should generally look like this (at least, mine did, and I did pretty well):

---

Generally, <Rule>. <Write out all relevant rules in bullet points>. (Don’t worry about whether it’s “readable”, just worry about whether you have stated as many relevant rules as possible. Don’t state irrelevant rules that don’t affect the outcome of the problem.)

Here, <Fact.> <Write out the relevant facts. State which facts satisfy which rules by literally saying things like “The cow is the property, and was moved across the road. This satisfies the requirement that the property have been moved.”>

As a result, <conclusion>.

---

What to Understand about the Bar MEE

Memorizing Rule Statements

You need to memorize rule statements for:

• Hearsay
• The individual torts
• Civil Procedure’s various jurisdictions
• MEE topics that nearly always test the same topics – i.e. Secured Transactions’ Attachment-Perfection-Priority and Family Law’s best interest of the child standard

Otherwise don’t bother memorizing rule statements word for word, as you’ll spend more energy getting exact words right when you’re only going to be graded on how well you understand and apply the rule that you state on the exam.

The Actual MEE

Taking the MEE on the bar is not like taking the MEE under any other situation. It can only be experienced genuinely when it’s in a real bar exam. By the time you get to the MEE, you’ve already written a few thousand words of analysis in the morning and you’re tired, rushed and scared. You will not remember the rules for the most part, let alone accurately restate them according to the level of specificity that Themis wants you to have. This is good news, because your essays are curved against everyone in your jurisdiction, and everyone else will have that problem too. Seriously, nobody remembers the exact rule statements once they’re in the chair.

The way to succeed on the MEE isn’t to memorize rule statements word for word, it’s to:

1. Understand the structure of the area of law being questioned, or at least conjure up a rule, statement test and factors that look pretty similar (i.e. You know that family law basically always uses the best interest of the child test when deciding kid-related things, so you cough up something like the test, and then…)
2. Analyze the test and those factors, matching them to the facts provided. Analyze each factor and state which direction it weighs. (…you spit out a few things that you see in the problem that are probably factors like income level and time with the parents and explain how each factor weighs on the outcome of the issue.)
3. Produce a clear conclusion statement stating exactly where you stand on the issue. It’s okay for factors to be indecisive, as long as it’s clear why they weigh differently.

Think of it like this: the MEE graders know you won’t remember the exact rule, and only give you a single point for remembering the rule. They want to see if you can issue spot and make an argument. So do that! Who cares if you don’t have all the rules exactly memorized? It’s not going to bump you from a 4 to a 3, it’ll bump you from a 4 to a 3.9. Spare yourself the stress of getting it right in the moment and focus on technique.

If you’re struggling in your practice runs on putting something on paper, just remember that 800-1000 words is about how much I wrote and I got that sweet, sweet 147.

How to Get Good at the MEE Mechanics

The way to get good at the MEE is to do a lot of MEEs. You want to be “johnny on the spot” when it comes to answering these questions, even if the answer is flatly wrong. I spent about a solid week doing nothing but MEE prep when I was 21-14 days prior to the bar (and then spent my remaining study time on UWorld and Themis MBE questions) to build up that mechanical approach in my head. It bugged the hell out of Themis because it meant I was no longer gaining percentage progress, but I actually gained quite a bit out of the experience.

Themis has optional MEE essays, and I recommend doing four per day once you’ve hit the 21 day-left mark. You should get through a lot of them pretty quick, and then you can spend the last two weeks on MBE.

The Last Three Weeks

I segment bar prep into the first seven weeks and the last three weeks because around three weeks prior to the bar exam, Themis has a mock bar exam using a real MPT set, real MBE and MEE questions and in an environment that will hopefully be similar to the bar exam. The purpose of this bar exam is not as a benchmark for your likely performance. If memory serves, I never even received a grade on mine (though I’m certain I failed it, as I had a panic attack during the essay portion). No, the purpose of the mock exam is simply to put you through the hardest bar exam essay and MBE questions once so you’re not completely incapacitated by emotions when the actual day comes.

The best advice I can give you for what to do after that exam is to:

1. Remember what you felt the most lost on. That’s what you need to study.
2. Feel everything. Don’t bottle up the emotions, as the emotions are the purpose of the afternoon. Get used to them so they don’t impede you on exam day.
3. Recognize that you have three weeks left, and that three weeks is actually a really long time if you don’t know something. By the time you’re this far into bar prep, you’ve narrowed down about 80% of the material you’ll need to succeed and could likely get at least a 240 if you took the bar exam that day. It’s just that laaaaast 20% of stuff that you need to worry about.
4. Know that the MPT, MEE and MBE questions were real (I went back and confirmed that Themis used the February 2018 MEE questions on mine, and recognized a few of the MBE questions from past assignments) and could be on your bar exam, but also that that honestly is about as bad as it gets. Now you know how hard it is, and you can prep for that.
5. P.S. The actual bar exam wasn’t as hard as the Themis one. It was about 80% as hard.
6. If everyone in the room felt shell shocked after it, congratulations – you’re on a curve against those people, and you probably all did just as well each other. You feel like you’re behind but you likely aren’t, since you’re on a curve against everyone else who will take the same essays you’ll take. If everyone else is struggling, you’re fine.
7. There will be the one asshole who’s like “man that was so easy! I’ve got this in the bag!” Delete that guy from your contacts, he’s not going to make it.

Otherwise…

Now that you’ve taken the practice bar exam and started on your last three-week period, it’s really up to you how you want to study. Be sure to knock out all the Themis MBE questions and about a thousand UWorld questions, and you should probably knock out at least four MEEs on each of the MBE topics. If you’re struggling with an MEE topic, do a few on that as well.

Be sure to keep up with the MPT practice, as you don’t want to forget how to approach them. They’re not something you can really study for, but don’t let those skills run dry.

Don’t skip your breaks. So long as you’re still maintaining that 8-hour workday plus an hour for lunch, you should be okay. Take a day off each of the last three weeks. Hell, I put down my books the Tuesday before the exam and picked them up the day before (to read each of the Final Review Outlines Themis makes, which are very helpful) and I did alright. This isn’t an exam that measures your intelligence, it’s an exam that measures your ability to sit and do the work endlessly while a mountain of stress is on you. In other words, it’s meant to mimic being a lawyer. I only did as well as I did despite having to divert away for a week because I’d put in the 8-hour days for the last nine weeks prior, and if I can do it you certainly can do it.

Best of luck, everyone.

Amiibo Doctor, Esquire

P.S. – Don’t add “Esquire” to the end of your name once you get sworn in.