Many students are unsure how best to prepare for the bar examination. Nearly all students planning to take the bar exam enroll in one or more bar preparation courses. Bar preparation courses assist graduates in reviewing substantive law, drafting essays and performance tests and approaching multiple choice questions.
Bar Prep Classes Offered by ASBP
The USD Law Office for Academic Success and Bar Programs offers three different courses to helps students prep for the Bar Exam. Explore these courses below.
- Multistate Bar Exam Review
- Fundamentals of Bar Exam Writing
- Legal Analysis
The Online MBE Course offers a robust conceptual understanding of highly tested areas of law and a flexible approach to solving bar exam questions via an asynchronous online platform. Students will review substantive doctrine through online lectures, assigned text, MBE questions and black-letter law. Through the course, students systematically build exam skills including reading comprehension, issue identification, rule mastery, application, critical thinking, and legal analysis. Students will also learn how to recognize and deal with common MBE “distractors.” Students receive a course textbook, workbook with problems, and access to BARBRI AMP and online lectures. The course assessment includes a 100-question diagnostic/baseline exam, midterm exam, and a comprehensive final exam.
Doctrinal Bar Courses
In order to be licensed to practice law in a particular state you must pass that state's licensing or "bar" exam. Most of the courses you took in your first year are covered on bar exams across the country. However, there are additional subjects covered on the bar exam that are not required for the JD degree, but that students are strongly encouraged to take as electives.
For the California Bar, these courses include:
- California Civil Procedure
- Community Property
- Constitutional Law II
- Corporations
- Criminal Procedure
- Evidence
- Remedies
- UCC Sales
- Wills and Trusts/Trusts and Estates
For the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), these courses include:
- Constitutional Law II
- Corporations
- Criminal Procedure
- Evidence
- Family Law
- UCC Sales
- Wills and Trusts/Trusts and Estates