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.
“Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.” Malcolm Gladwell: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Say you’re an experienced California Bar Examination grader, as I was. You’ve graded essay answers for ten examinations – at least 7,000 books. You’re grading Essay #5 on the February 2009 examination. You’re calibrated to the 11 or so other graders on your team – meaning that you consistently stick to the grading standards the team reached following a day and half of deliberations. You read every word of every answer, often twice, before you assign it a grade. You take your job seriously.
Do you honestly think you can ignore your first impression of each answer, or even of pieces of the answer, when you’re grading?
I graded bar examination answers – essays and performance tests – for ten years before I went on to membership on the Committee of Bar Examiners and then to becoming the State Bar Examinations Director. To each answer I graded, I almost always had an immediate and instinctive first impression, a “Blink Moment.” Malcolm Gladwell describes this phenomenon as “…[R]apid cognition … the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking about buying, or read the first two sentences of a book, your mind jumps to a series of conclusions.”
I didn’t assign a grade based on that impression – I always read every word before I decided. But I couldn’t ignore my instinct either – it was my introduction to that answer – a handshake with that applicant.
If what I’ve described makes sense to you, how are you going to write an answer that makes your grader’s instinctive reaction a good one?
Further installments on this topic will give you some tips – some easy, some more difficult on exploiting your grader’s “Blink Moment.”
Copyright 2011 Adam Ferber and www.ferberbarreview.com. Reprinted by permission.
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