Failing Barbri Essays

Goodies! I asked CA Bar Exam Advice 2007 a question. She replied with an article which I think is very sincere and helpful. So the following article is from her blog. The copyright belongs to her. However, I would like to share this article with you, my dear barbri pals.

Failing Barbri Essays

Here's the question: "I failed 2 barbri essays. I am really stressed now. Can you give me some advice? Do you know anyone who failed barbri essays and still passed the bar exam? Thank you."

First of all, almost everyone I know failed at least one, if not more, of their Barbri essays. I know I failed the PT and a few others.

You should take a look at the essays and see why you are failing.
1) If you fail the rules section, that's not a big deal because you probably haven't memorized anything at this point.
2) If you fail the issue spotting, I highly recommend you outline many essays. Take a past essay, spend 10-15 minutes doing an outline, and see which issues you missed. Note that Barbri is much more strict than the actual bar. If you look, Barbri requires you to spot way more issues than the actual bar, but you must spot the major ones to pass.
3) If you fail the analysis portion, you might want to see what comments you are getting, and you may need to develop your analysis more.
4) I think the last one is organization, so if you use a ton of headers, you should be fine on this.

Barbri is not perfect, and I have heard of someone just copying the model answer and turning it it. They got a fail. I think you are required to fail most people in the beginning so they will work harder.

However, if someone isn't seeing something on your essays or analysis, maybe you need to be more clear in your writing. Yes, the grader probably spends less than 5 minutes on your essay, but so will the bar exam reader. So, make everything as clear as possible and use tons of headers for every issue. Don't hide a subissue in your analysis. It's helpful to have someone from Barbri read your essays because you may think you fully analyzed an issue, but if someone can't see it, then maybe you need to add a header or make it more clear.

So, don't worry about failing, but you should be improving. So, if you got all Fs in the first essay and are getting Ps on the later essays, that's a good sign. Just keep at it!