Allie Robbins
Associate Professor of Law
CUNY School of Law
For the past few years, I have co-taught a pre-bar course for students in their final semester. The course covers some heavily tested doctrine, as well as the academic and test-taking skills needed to succeed on the essay, multiple-choice, and performance components of the bar exam. In order to deliver the doctrinal material, we gave lectures based off of outlines from a commercial bar review course. While we tried to mirror the traditional bar review lecture style of following the outline closely, we did permit questions during the lectures. Additionally, we interspersed practice questions throughout the lectures, and gave many examples. The result, (I like to think), was that students walked out of class with a fairly good understanding of the rules. The downside, of course, was that we didn’t accurately reflect the actual experience of commercial bar review lectures, which are not interactive, even when students choose to attend live lectures. Additionally, while we tried to do MBEs and/or essays in every class, we often spent so much time on the doctrine that we were unable to do as much in-class practice as we would have liked to do.