Did you see the July 08 bar passage rates for USF? Way up there, 87% first time takers. In fact, their passage rates are always high.

http://calbar.ca.gov/calbar/pdfs/admissions/Statistics/JULY2008STATS.pdf

One legal aid person told me that they didn't care about grades, and instead wanted people with a proven commitment to nonprofit/public work. And this was for an internship. I thought that was stupid because they seemed to be prefering this over competence. Also, it excludes people interested in this type of work that could potentially be interested in a long-term public service career.

I focused mostly on the Conviser mini-review and the lecture handouts. It's funny, I knew some of the material pretty well, as far as what was in those books. But in numerous cases while I was studying, questions popped up in my mind as to gaps in the material, or areas where it seemed ambiguous. And it turned out that that's a lot of what was tested on the MBE. It certainly seemed like the MBE question creators were aware of the Barbri material and wrote questions that were just beyond the scope of that material. So I'd advise future bar exam takers to actually contact the professors if you have a question!

For example, there was a criminal law question (I may not remember it 100% correctly) that concerned what crimes a Defendant could be found guilty of. After obtaining equipment for the purpose of committing the crime, Defendant changed his mind and attempted to talk his co-conspirators out of the crime. However, the other participants committed the crime anyway, using the equipment he procured.

Of course he's guilty of conspiracy, and I'm not sure whether that was relevant in the answer choices. But was his attempt to talk the other particpants out of committing the crime enough to prevent culpability for the committed offense? Was he required to do more, such as go to the police and actually prevent the crime?

I'm sure everyone thinks that was the easiest question on the exam, but to me it's an example of a lack of clarity in the Barbri materials.

As an aside, what was up with the question where there was a purchase-money mortgage by a third-party bank and the seller's loan made to finance the purchase of the property that was secured by a note but no mortgage. Which has priority after foreclosure?

"truly worth it"?

To me being a member of law review wasn't that big of a deal. It was 1) a small commitment every other week doing some citechecking, which wasn't fun but helped me learn the bluebook, and 2) writing a comment on a subject of my choosing (that satisfied my paper requirement).

In interviews, employers seem to like law review membership more than they like my membership in the table tennis club.

You can always write a separate comment and submit it to other journals for publication, whether or not you are a member of your school's law review. If you have a few hours each week you don't mind sacrificing, I'd say go for it. That goes for the table tennis club as well. 

I already finished my 6-day PMBR. It's a nice little primer getting you reacquainted with the stuff you haven't studied since 1L. It's also pretty good practice learning the format and types of questions on the MBE. But that's all it is.

The real action comes with your substantive bar review class (ex. barbri). If you already have your barbri books, you can review the Conviser mini-review before taking each 50 question MBE test so you'll do a little better. The barbri books, and not the little notes that some people take during the PMBR lectures, are your real source for the law.

Personally, I liked to go through about 5-10 questions at a time, and then really study the answer explanations. The explanations in the back are pretty good, and the usefulness of going to the lectures was marginal for me.