Bar Exam Resources - Preparing for the Bar Exam

Bar examinees are generally expected to invest roughly 400-600 hours into studying for the bar. Most schedules assume that students will distribute this time over the course of about 8 to 10 weeks, or two to three months, meaning that full-time students spend 40-50 hours per week studying. 

However, bar study schedules aren't one-size-fits-all. If you're planning to study for the bar exam part-time while working or managing other obligations, you may wish to start early and give yourself closer to four to six months to prepare.

Establishing an effective schedule for bar study and sticking to it is a critical part of maintaining a disciplined study practice. Developing an idea of what you're going to do when can also make the exam feel a little less overwhelming once it's been broken down into manageable chunks.

Full-time study schedules accounting for 8 to 10 weeks (2-3 months) of work generally suggest breaking down bar prep tasks into two-week chunks. The Miami Herald proposes the following study schedule for a ten-week (~3-month) prep plan.

Weeks 1-2: Focus on fundamental topics such as torts, property, and other 1L courses that will definitely be on the exam. Study outlines and review videos from your bar prep course. Start your first rounds of MBE practice questions. Get ready to practice MBE questions daily for the next two months.

Weeks 3-5: Start your first rounds of essay questions and MPT exercises. Add in study of topics that will appear on the MEE or state essay section, such as family law and business associations. Keep up your daily MBE practice.

Weeks 6-7: Start simulating bar exam conditions to measure your performance under a time limit. Take your first full-length mock exam, including MBE questions, MPTs, and an essay section. Your bar prep course will likely have these for you, but resources can also be found online. Review your answers carefully and determine where you could use improvement.

Weeks 8-9: Target the weak areas you discovered in weeks 6-7. Refine your outlining, issue spotting, and analytic skills to improve the subjects where your scores are lowest. Keep drilling practice questions from all three sections of the exam.

Week 10: Rest and take care of yourself. Focus on condensed review such as flashcards and outlines. Take another timed practice exam if you have the time to do so.

It's possible to break down a full-time study schedule even further in order to account for every hour of study you complete per day. The American Bar Association suggests a completely planned-out 10-hour study schedule with built-in breaks, resulting in about 8 hours of daily active study. (To view this link, you can sign up for a student ABA membership here.)

Working while studying for the bar adds an additional challenge to the bar prep process. The bar prep website Make This Your Last Time offers study tips geared specifically toward working students in order to improve your likelihood of passing the bar while still holding down a full-time job. These include:

• Setting healthy boundaries at work. Talk to your boss about the possibility of going part-time (if feasible), taking time off for the bar, and balancing your workload to give yourself time to study during the day.
• Avoiding procrastination whenever possible. Working and studying can lead to putting off bar prep at the end of a long workday. However, pushing back bar study gives you a heavier and more stressful workload later on, and damages your ability to make gradual process on study topics.
• Getting enough sleep and taking breaks. Squeezing in bar study around a full-time job doesn't mean staying up all night and studying seven days a week. Give yourself at least one rest day weekly and go to bed reasonably early to keep your brain healthy and ready to work.

Working means less time to study during the day, so you'll have to extend your bar study period in order to meet the 400-600 hour mark. Students studying part-time should expect to study for roughly 18 to 26 weeks (4-6 months) before the bar.

The extended length of time you'll be studying makes part-time study plans much more variable than full-time plans. The Kansas City Star breaks the process down into four phases, each lasting roughly 1-2 months.

• Phase 1: Intensive studying to relearn MBE core topics and practice MBE questions.
• Phase 2: Start work on MEE subjects, keeping in mind that there's no way to know in advance which subjects will be on the exam. Practice MPT exercises and MEE answers. Increase the number of MBE questions you complete every day.
• Phase 3: Intensive practice across all three sections of the test. Take at least one timed mock exam. Focus on areas that need work.
• Final month: General review of everything you've learned. Focus on knowledge gaps and dedicate time to the sections of the test you find most difficult.

The Star also suggests a weekly study schedule for part-time examinees covering about 20-25 hours of study per week.

• Weekdays: 2-3 hours in the evening/your off hours. Focus on a single activity per night, such as reviewing a single subject or completing one set of MBE questions.
• Weekends: 5-8 hours of dedicated study on days you're off of work. Plan for longer blocks of study to review course lectures, practice timed answers to MEEs and MPTs, or run through longer MBE sets.

In addition to the study guides and tips mentioned on the first page, many commercial bar prep brands also offer suggested guides and timelines for bar study based on their own program requirements. 

Barbri: Barbri offers an 8-10 week course, and relies primarily on its adaptive scheduling tool to generate study plans. It does provide a breakdown on its website of how much time students generally spend on different aspects of bar study throughout the course.

Kaplan: Kaplan's bar prep course is 8 weeks long. Kaplan doesn't provide a sample study plan, but does offer a few tips for the 10 days before the bar exam.

Themis: Themis offers an 8-week course through its "directed study" program. Its website contains day-by-day sample schedules for each of the 49 U.S. jurisdictions it serves.

Aspen Publishing partners with Themis for bar prep. It hosts a sample three-month plan to be used alongside the Themis course and Aspen resources such as Law in a Flash.

No matter whether you're following a full-time or part-time study schedule, the night before the exam is one of the most important parts of passing the bar. Make sure you eat and sleep well, and resist the urge to pull an all-nighter cramming in extra study. Your brain and scores will thank you if you give yourself a break rather than adding stress. Look into the self-care tips on this guide to get yourself relaxed and ready to test.