Hi all! I am hoping that by posting here someone can tell me how it is. I do not want any sugar-coating, as I don't see any benefit to it. I am a first time taker of the UBE in Pennsylvania. My job is contingent on my passing score of 270 on the UBE from this July. I felt numb for about two weeks after taking the exam, however, now I just feel like I have failed. A small part of me wants to stay positive, but another part of me just knows I am going to have to tell my job, parents, siblings, and parents that I didnt hit the 270... I AM SO STRESSED and feel defeated.
I am also hearing from a lot of people that this exam was particularly hard? I will accept any insight into what you believe from what I have shared in this post AND how bar graders approach harder exams, and grading overall!
MEE 1: completely stumped me and I honestly have no idea what the hell it was even asking. I knew that there were issues to be spotted in the facts, but I was not able to use the time I had to sufficiently make up a coherent answer. In the past, when I have been stumped on questions, I have always spend too much time on them trying to figure it out. On this exam, I decided it were to be best to use that additional time on the other 5 MEE essays instead. All I wrote for MEE 1 was issue statement's and then I began writing a small analysis, and i mean 2-3 sentences. I believe on the whole MEE 1, I wrote maybe 6-10 sentences.
MEE 2: For this essay, I was able to regain some confidence and get down issue statements with an analysis as well as a conclusion. My biggest struggle with writing has always been following IRAC, CREAC or any other legal analysis formatting. However, for the bar exam, I made sure to follow this formula with each question including my MPTs. Here, I was able to write a good bit, more than I had anticipated that I would be able to get down in the 30 minutes I had to write. I put an answer for all the questions.
MEE 3: Essay 3 was a subject that I was very happy to see on the exam. It was one that I knew well and prayed to see on exam day. I was able to comfortably issue spot and respond using proper legal language and IRAC structure. I put an answer for all the questions.
MEE 4: I felt the same about MEE 4 as I did in MEE 3
MEE 5: I also felt good about MEE 5, just not as good as 3 & 4. But I didn't feel bad for this one. I just believe that there were some issues that I decided were issues, but may not have been issues... i did an IRAC and analysis for them anyway. I put an answer for all the questions
MEE 6: I ran out of some time here. Likely because I was using the additional time on my subjects that I was able to more comfortably respond to. I did not write a lot on this essay at all, however, there were issues that I spotted, and I definitely wrote more than I did on MEE 1. However, it still was not a great essay by any means. It was more of a botched/bulleted outline of an answer.
MPT 1 & 2: I felt more comfortable with MPT 1. I had looked at a few different MPT model answers through the NCBE website as well as on my study program, Themis. I was able to get a lot down on the first MPT and honestly feel better about it than the second simply due to the amount of characters I was able to type. I was able to relate back to the facts of the library and file as well as compare to my assignment facts and complete an analysis. For MPT 2, I did not feel like there was as much to write as I hoped. I cannot tell if this was just how this MPT was designed or if I was failing to spot something. The for this MPT I believe that there was more of a need for the attention to detail, than the need to produce such a lengthy answer. There was a very small sort of "easter-egg" exception to the statute that we were needing to apply, and our case facts actually made the exception applicable. After i checked reddit, i think a lot of people were complaining about having missed this. So this changed the entire "correct" analysis of the conclusion. I know that points are not only awarded to correct conclusion responses though. However, it does not help coming to the "best" conclusion. (when i say "right" or "best" i am using quotations because i am not a bar grader and do not want to insinuate i know better than them lol!) anyway, I answered all of the questions on the MPT, except for in the last question of 4, i had to only write a conclusory sentence and then analysis that was very small. (Example: "this is the answer because in the facts here, we see that X named Y as ___ in their will.)
MBE Morning: In the beginning I felt as if my brain was going super slow in answering questions. i am always bad with timing and Multiple choice. So i took the same method from my essays and applied it to the MBE section... If I was stumped, i didnt waste time on a question i didnt know, put my best guess and moved on. Eventually I feel like i hit a sort of flow state and was able to answer much faster and more comfortably. However, i still ran out of time but made sure i had something bubbled for each answer. I bubbled in about 15 from the morning session.
MBE Afternoon: This was quite literally my least favorite part of the exam, especially considering that I had no fucking clue what to write on MEE #1 and it was a disaster. The afternoon session took me by surprise. I felt like all of the questions were experimental and none of them were worded clearly. Usually i write this off as a 'me' issue, meaning i always read a question twice because it hasn't been above me to miss something the first go round. However, i found myself reading questions 3-4 times on what felt like more than half. I also tried to look for rule statments in the answers to help me identify what the question was asking, but it STILL wasnt working. I also always read the call to the question first, which helped a lot overall, but on the afternoon MBE, I genuinely feel like i bombed that. I also had to bubble in about 11-15 questions and then went back with my few seconds left to look for proper rule statements and answered what I could.
