Studying for the bar exam. No one enjoys it and no one wants to repeat the experience. My question for this post is relevant to anyone taking a bar-exam prep class live or through video or audio: How do bar-exam students listen most effectively in studying for the bar? This post explores how bar takers can listen with power—bar-exam-taking power.

Knowledge Base Before Listening

The sad truth is that you can learn something a lot better when you already know it—or at least when you already know something about what you’re supposed to be learning. The less you know about a subject, the harder it is to listen and pay attention to anyone talking about that subject. The good bar-prep companies certainly know this and try to make the material entertaining and easy to follow.

But you can take some of your own steps before a lecture. Advance prep could provide more of a framework for listening to the bar lecture:

• Look at a bar study guide for a quick outline of the topic.
• Look at the table of contents of a case book on the topic.
• If the topic is statutory, skim the statutory outline for that area of law your state.
• Make diagrams of the topic or find a diagram you can use to help think about what you’re going to hear. Recopying the diagram in your own hand will be more powerful than just looking at diagrams.
• Google the topic and find some real-world scenarios. Learning how this area of law works in the world could motive more focused listening.
• Look at a few bar-exam questions that ask questions on the topic. Not only could this build some knowledge by showing you how the issues might arise in a quasi-real-world situation, but it could also tap into a pretty powerful motivator of attention: FEAR.

Hearing/Stimulus and Awareness

Listening is not the same thing as hearing, but hearing is necessary to listening. Therefore the most obvious thing to say here is to make sure you are hearing and paying attention to the lecture. Don’t half-listen during the bar-exam lectures, assuming you’ll go over it in your notes later. Giving only “continuous partial attention” to the scintillating lecture on commercial paper means you’re already introducing an inefficiency into your bar preparation.

And here I’m going to get controversial for a moment. Please do not allow yourself to tune out the lecture by telling yourself “I’m not an auditory learner. I learn better with pictures/charts/emojis/etc.” The idea that people have a preferred “learning style” is under serious attack. Howard Garner, the widely credited source of “multiple intelligences” has publicly asked educators to stop equating them with “learning styles.”

People may prefer to learn a certain way, but that does not mean they actually do learn better that way; critics say the idea of “learning styles” is intuitively appealing but lacking in reliable proof. That controversy can’t be resolved here, and it doesn’t need to be. Just don’t use the idea of learning styles as an excuse to listen with less than full attention. Test-takers should take full advantage of different ways to learn from traditional lectures to charting to flash cards to a surprising option you can read about at the end of this post.

And one more note about the initial hearing part: I really don’t think it will work to listen to bar-prep audio recordings on a speeded-up pace. (Do experts recommend this idea?) It seems you want some pauses in between the information to give your  mind time to actually process it. Those pauses may frustrate the bored or distracted mind (more on this in a future post). But your goal in studying for the bar is not to be entertained every second. It’s to pass the d*mn bar.

Understanding/Translation/Interpretation/Evaluation

The prevalent models of the listening process all include a variety of hidden intellectual functions such as interpreting, translating, understanding, and evaluating.

One trick to true understanding is knowing whether you in fact understand. But the Dunning-Kruger effect seems alive and well across every domain—meaning unprepared bar takers may be not only unprepared but also unable to know just how unprepared they are.

Stated more constructively, try to monitor your own understanding while listening, and afterwards via practice exams. Lots of them. In a perfect world, we all understand everything the first time it passes our ears. But it’s not a perfect world, and the next best thing is to know something is important and also to know you’re not getting it. You might know it right then during the lecture, or later after bombing a practice exam. But then you can do something about the lack of understanding.

Remembering/Recall

Remembering (at least for the short term) is part of listening, and part of overall cognitive functioning. And remembering details—especially details that aren’t inherently interesting—is difficult.

To prepare for a high-pressure memorization test, you want to get the information “set” in your long-term memory for use on the bar. This doesn’t mean remembering it forever, but long-term memory is the right term. Short-term or working memory only holds information for about 30 seconds tops, and that’s not good enough.  

To pass information to long-term memory, you have to bring it up and use it and repeatedly pass it back through your working memory. That means you can expect to do a lot of flash cards, practice exams, and other active study techniques to help this process. Active studying supplements the listening process and reinforces the learning.

But is there anything bar students can do at the moment of listening to make the most of that listening moment, maximizing their memory for later?

Here the power of the eye may help supplement the power of the ear. As you listen to the lecture, try diagramming what you learn. Make a visual. Make a chart. Draw a picture of each element of the test. Imagine a ridiculous scenario with a clown using commercial paper in some memorable fashion.

If you’re really into exotic yet powerful memory techniques, try building a “Memory Palace” and associating different pieces of information with locations in your memory palace. The Bar Association of San Francisco wrote about this concept here. Solo Practice University wrote about it here. I haven’t tried it, but I did enjoy the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which is about the same technique and if nothing else, would be an entertaining post-bar-exam read.

Closely related to this process of remembering is how you take notes. Let me say this now and be very clear:

Do not take notes on your laptop. 

It is growing clearer and clearer (like here and here and here) that students remember material better when they take notes by hand, as in using handwriting on a piece of paper. This is hard pill for many law students to swallow because it cuts against years of habit. Maybe a more realistic recommendation is this: Don’t take notes on your laptop by default, just because you may have done so throughout law school. There is pretty good evidence that taking notes by hand is at least as good if not better than taking notes on a laptop. Try it. Maybe you’ll like it.

Responding

Bar lectures are not a deep Socratic exploration of legal theory and jurisprudence. You don’t need to respond to a bar-exam lecture by lining up to pose some theoretical responses and analytical challenges to the material. (Really, please don’t.) As many bar-exam prep experts advise: nobody gets a special reward for an “A” on the bar exam.

Likewise, bar lectures do not require an emotional, empathetic, caring reaction. Really, it may be the most antisocial learning environments of all time.

What, then, is the proper response for a listener?

The response is the studying. The flash cards. The practice essays. Clarification and deeper study of certain problem areas. Eventually, the response is what you do with the information on the exam.

One bar prep source suggests that the #1 mistake is “passive studying.” Don’t go back and half-listen again. Study actively and aggressively to learn and retain the information. Use all the ways to learn, from lectures to diagrams to reading text to taking practice tests. Move around to different study locations to help you remember the material more, rather than staying in one comfortable place. 

And if you really need a change of pace, put in the earbuds and dance. Or at least think about dancing while taking in these “Bar Exam Study Songs.” (HT Lee Burgess of Bar Exam Toolbox for the review.) It’s an unexpected and unorthodox way to incorporate more listening into your bar-exam study routine—but why not?

Lastly, don’t forget the final step of the listening process, as formulated in the Worthington/Fitch-Hauser model:

“Stay Connected and Motivated.”

And good luck to all.

Bar-exam prep is a well-developed industry of its own, with many highly experienced and skillful tutors and prep resources. I’d love to hear from bar-exam prep experts with their advice on listening during the prep process. And for bar-exam takers, what types of listening techniques have worked or not worked? What would you recommend to those studying right now?