Adam Ferber is the former Examinations Director for the State Bar of California and grader of 40 California Bar and First-Year Law Students’ Examinations. He provides intensive, individualized tutoring and coaching to applicants for both exams, as well as counseling and advocacy for applicants appealing their unsuccessful exam results. Contact Adam at www.ferberbarreview.com or on Facebook at Ferber Bar Review – Student Resource Group.
“He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” Bertolt Brecht
“If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants.” Albert Einstein
The Almost Daily Word has lately been giving you the straight skinny on the subtle and not-so-subtle signs that you could fail the California Bar Exam, and on how to decrease that risk. You can make yourself stronger, smarter, more strategic and better prepared for what’s ahead.
Here’s another risk avoidance technique for your tool box:
Study smarter – and keep your pants on!
Almost all the Bar Exam applicants I’ve met, be they first-timers or repeaters, study “pedal-to-the-metal,” “24-7″ right up to exam time. They are all in danger of losing their pants.
Hal Pashler and Doug Roher, psychology professors and frequent collaborators, are fascinated by how people learn and remember. In their article Increasing Retention Without Increasing Study Time (2007 – Current Directions of Psychological Science) they examined two well known but poorly understood study questions: How long should one study the same material before quitting or shifting to new material, and how should a fixed amount of study time be distributed across study sessions? What they found should be a lesson to you.
- Know When to Quit
Say you’ve devoted a study session to understanding better the various degrees of murder. After an hour, you’ve been able to answer every multiple choice question you can access on the topic without error. Still, you’re concerned about forgetting what you’ve learned. Should you immediately go over the material one more time?
According to Pashler and Roher, if the Bar Exam is more than a week away, the answer is probably no. They call this continued studying of the same topic “overlearning,” or “massing.” For about a week, it produces better test results. But soon after that gains decline rapidly. Eventually, they are undetectable.
- Spacing Instead of Massing
There is a better alternative to massing: spread the total amount of study time on one topic across two study sessions separated by an interval. This is called “spacing,” and the improvement it makes on test results is considerable. “Final test performance,” say Pashler and Roher, ” depends heavily on the duration of the spacing gap, with too-brief gaps causing poorer performance than excessively long gaps.”
In two separate experiments, the professors fixed the amount of time they allowed their student-subjects to study. However, they varied what they called the “Inter-[study]-session Interval” (the “ISI”), the amount of time between study sessions. Then they measured how much of what they studied the students retained, and for how long.
In their first experiment, ISI’s varied between 5 minutes and 14 days. A one-day ISI produced the greatest improvement in test scores. In their second, where the students were asked to remember the names of a number of very obscure objects, they varied the ISI from 5 minutes to 6 months! Longer intervals produced even better results in the amount and duration of retention. The optimum ISI was 1 month!
Pashler and Roher concluded that “…[P]owerful spacing effects occur over all practically meaningful time periods. … [F]inal test performance depends heavily on the spacing gaps, with too brief gaps causing poorer performance than excessively long gaps.”
- The Take-Away
- Limit and optimize the time that you study a discrete topic. It’s time to quit when you have attained a reasonable (even if temporary) mastery of that limited topic.
- Study a separate topic (or topics) before you return to where you started. Or, better yet, take a break! With time and practice you should be able to approximate your own ISI.
Use of these study techniques may be the key, both to a successful bar exam result AND to keeping your pants on.
Copyright 2011 Adam Ferber and www.ferberbarreview.com. Reprinted by permission.
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