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Episode 118: More on Memorization for the Bar Exam Barexamtoolbox Lee Burgess: Welcome to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. Today, we are talking about memorization techniques for efficient bar study. 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. Alison Monahan: Welcome back to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. Today, we're talking more about memorization, since, well, you have to do it to pass the bar exam. So, Lee, why do you think memorization is such a big problem for so many people who are studying for the bar? Lee Burgess: Well, I think the biggest issue is just the volume of the law. If you took BARBRI, you probably got a book called The Conviser Mini Review. The mini review is like 400 pages or more. Alison Monahan: Yeah, not very mini. Lee Burgess: Not very mini. And that is just like a hint of how much law there is to learn. It really is like cramming for all of your law school exams in one fell swoop, it's a lot. And so I think the volume is a big problem. I also think that – and this is going to be an issue, I think, for students who have gone to law school virtually in the COVID days – is, most exams are open book, and I think more exams are going to be open book because people are taking exams remotely. And so, you may not be very well-versed in memorization at all. Alison Monahan: Oh yeah. We didn't have any closed book exams in law school. I think I had half of my Evidence exam as a final semester 3L was closed book, and we were all just like, "What is this nonsense? Like, what?" And literally that was it, everything else was open book. I never had to memorize any law. Lee Burgess: Mine were closed book, but I remember being a 1L and watching some of my friends in law school who had been science majors, who had taken things like O- Chem, and complicated classes which required a lot of memorization, and they had the game down, man. They were working whatever system they had used in college. And I was a Psychology and Media Studies major, so I did not do the same kind of huge amounts of memorization, and so it was a learning curve. So Episode 118: More on Memorization for the Bar Exam Page 1 of 15 BarExamToolbox.com if you haven't done this in law school up to this point very often, then you need to brush up on your techniques, because here we go. Alison Monahan: Yeah. I remember second semester Org – that was the one that finally killed... That was the worst grade I've ever gotten in my life, and the reason is because we had like four tests, and by the second test, I decided I wasn't going to go to med school, so I just stopped studying. And the tests were literally memorization – it was just like, "Can you sit down and memorize hundreds and hundreds of these equations?" And that was just not something I was interested in, so I just didn't do it. And then I barely passed. Like very, very barely passed. So memorization was never my strong suit. I'm more of a big picture thinker. Lee Burgess: Yeah. I think there are also a lot of misconceptions around the bar, about how much you need to know and how accurately you need to know things. I think that's worth unpacking a little bit. Alison Monahan: I agree. Lee Burgess: So, the reality is you are not going to know everything perfectly. It's really not possible unless you have a photographic memory. Alison Monahan: Right. But where I think that can lead people astray is they hear that and then they think, "O, well, I don't need to know anything perfectly." And I'm not sure that's really right, either. Lee Burgess: Oh, I agree. And I think I've become a little more focused on that fact the longer I do this work. I think there is absolutely some stuff you do need to know perfectly. You don't need to know everything perfectly, but you need to know a chunk of stuff perfectly. Alison Monahan: Right, there are just certain things. And people get very frustrated sometimes around this, or annoyed when we push back on them when they're our students and saying, "Look, you need to get these words right." "Oh well, I've got the concept." It's like, you don't need the concept to summary judgment; you need to say the words. They're basically magic words for a lot of this stuff that comes up all the time, and if you don't know cold the words that you need to say when hearsay shows up, that's a problem. But then there are lots of other things that you need to be able to identify and kind of have a general sense of, but you don't necessarily, and it's not realistic, to think that you will have element-by- element, word-by-word knowledge of each and every single one of those things. It's just not possible. Episode 118: More on Memorization for the Bar Exam Page 2 of 15 BarExamToolbox.com Lee Burgess: Right. I think evidence is a great example for this because there are just some things, like you must write out "Hearsay is an out of court statement offered for the truth of the matter asserted." You can't say anything other than that. That is the rule for hearsay, which you memorize in law school, and that's just got to be at the tip of your tongue. And then even when you get into some of the hearsay exceptions, you need to know exactly if it's a three-prong test, what those three prongs are, and there might be terms of art in those three prongs. But maybe some greater concepts, you don't need to know the exact wording. But on a lot of this stuff, especially if it's codified law, you just have to know the buzzwords. And you might say, "Well, I don't need to know those buzzwords because it's only going to show up in an MBE question." But the MBE question tests the knowledge of those buzzwords in the answer choices. Alison Monahan: Right, exactly. Lee Burgess: So, you do have to learn those terms of art and those buzzwords. They still are important. I think that some things that are tiny nuances that you don't need to know with as much detail, but if it's got elements to it, terms of art, or if it's something that's just really common knowledge in the legal community, then you just need to know that stuff. And I think we've been doing a lot of our "Listen and Learn" series on the podcast. If you're listening and you haven't checked those out, you might find those interesting, because what we're doing is we're giving rule statements for heavily-tested law on the bar exam, and then we're working through examples. And we give you a sentence. It's like, "This is the sentence." Alison Monahan: Right, just learn it. Lee Burgess: Just learn it. Learn it, memorize it. It's almost easier to just memorize it than it is to try and think about how best to frame the rule statement. Just memorize it. Alison Monahan: Right, and I think for the most heavily-tested part of each subject area, there are things, many things, that you'd need to just be able to reel off element-by- element off the top of your tongue. Lee Burgess: Yeah. Alison Monahan: But what do you think, what's a realistic goal for people to memorize for each of these areas? Like one page of stuff, 10 pages of stuff? What kind of scale are we talking about? I mean, assuming not 100 pages. Lee Burgess: It's so hard, because it's like the font size is so tiny. What is really one page? Episode 118: More on Memorization for the Bar Exam Page 3 of 15 BarExamToolbox.com Alison Monahan: In general. Lee Burgess: 12-point font, Times New Roman. Alison Monahan: Yeah, 10 to 12-point font, you know. Normal margins. Lee Burgess: Right. I think that probably if you took the heavily-tested stuff in each subject, you're looking at a couple of pages per subject. Alison Monahan: I think that's right. Lee Burgess: Maybe a little bit longer for some of the MBE ones. So, let's give yourself two to three. I think you can fit the most heavily-tested on probably, let's say three pages per subject.
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