How to pass both Ontario Bar exams on the first attempt

Introduction -- Taking practice exams

Not reading a word before May 2023, I spent a month preparing for the Barrister and two weeks for the Solicitor. Intensive as they were, I passed both on May 30 and June 13, 2023. I will share my tips with future Bar exam takers. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all technique; you should adjust my tips based on your style.

Starting with a mindset, there is no need to ponder whether the Bar exam is meaningless – the Bar exam is there to “bar” people from practicing the law; the name says it all. It is just another game you need to win, and some wise techniques will increase your odds of winning for the Bar game.?

Only TWO skills matter in the Bar game: 1) your familiarity with the materials, and 2) your time management. There is ONE technique to improve both – TAKING PRACTICE EXAMS. Practice exams bring about the following benefits:

1. You will be faster. The exam is about how fast you can find the answer from the study guide rather than how much information you can memorize. Taking practice exams is a faster way because your mind will identify the issues faster,?your hands will flip the pages faster, and?your eyes will locate the answers faster.
2. You will get familiar with the study materials more efficiently. Research shows that studying with questions is more efficient than plain reading. Why bother going through the entire 2000-page materials first, only to forget everything later? Instead, your level of familiarity will increase dramatically after taking practice exams.
3. You will see similar questions in real exams. As long as you have done sufficient practice questions, you will enjoy numerous “déjà vu” moments on the big day. The “precedents” in your practice will save you precious time in real exams.

In the following parts, I will first review some key facts about the Bar exam, describe my ways to prepare your materials, and then come to the main section – practice exams. After that, I prepared some tips for the exam eve and the big day.

Critical facts of the Bar exam

You can find many detailed descriptions of the Bar exam, but the following facts are critical:

1. Time is strapped. You have 270 minutes for 160 questions as of the status quo, not merciful for you to carefully examine the materials for all questions. You should aim to answer at least 40% of the questions without flipping the materials.
2. Sections are isolated. Any question in the real exam is designated to only one of the four sections in the Barrister exam or of the three sections in the Solicitor exam. That means a question ONLY tests the content from that section, even though the contents of different sections may overlap. For example, don’t turn to the Public Law section when a Charter challenge question appears in the Criminal Law section.
3. The number of questions from each section is different. Thicker sections in the study guide carry more questions in the exam. Namely, you can expect more questions from the Civil Litigation and Business Law sections.
4. Professional Responsibility (PR) does not have its own exam section, but PR questions lurk in all the exam sections. Most of them can be answered based on your common sense from a legal professional’s perspective (not from a politician’s perspective!) without flipping your materials. Also, the essence of PR questions is the same for both Barrister and Solicitor exams; you only need to prepare for PR once.
5. There are several case studies in each section besides individual questions. Be patient when reading a short fact pattern before answering a list of questions. Many practice exams lack case study questions (because composing a fact pattern is tedious).
6. The passing score and passing rate are mysteries, but anecdotal data believe the passing rate is 90%, including those who have written twice or thrice. After some math, the passing rate of first-time writers is only around 54%. (For those wondering how I got the answer, x+x(1-x)+x(1-x)^2=0.9. Solve it, x=0.5358)

Prepare your materials for the exam

An effective material organization is the prequel to good time management.

1. Double-sided print the study guides from the General Table of Contents (ToC) to the LSO By-laws in Appendices (inclusive). Don’t print the Table of Authorities unless you don’t mind wasting your money. If you want to use Indices and Charts from the U of T or other sources, double-sided print them too. Don’t print out any “Summaries” – useless for exams. You want double-sided for the sake of your backpack and your back.?
2. Bind the General and Detailed ToC into a single booklet, as you need to refer to the ToC throughout the exam. Bind different sections into separate booklets since you only need one section of study materials at any time. Bind LSO By-laws in a booklet, too. If you use indices, also put different sections into different booklets. Attach cover pages of different colours to distinguish different sections, which is the good old colour code. Don’t bind the entire study guide in a single binder, or your hands will feel the excruciation traversing the colossal encyclopedia.
3. ToC is more useful than indices, but you may still want indices at hand. Searching based on logical relevance in ToC is much faster than searching based on alphabetical keywords in indices. Moreover, one keyword in the indices may show up in multiple locations, which may lead you to the wrong places. However, indices are particularly useful in two scenarios: 1) when answering a question directly about a rule, such as “What does Rule 1.2 dictate?” 2) In the early stages of your preparation, you usually need to rely on indices first and gradually shift to ToC.?

Practice exams

Now, let’s get down to the core. You first buy exams, then write exams, and after each practice session, you review your performance. I will elaborate on each step below.

-Buy practice exams

I suggest buying 4 to 7 full-length exams for Barrister and Solicitor respectively, namely 8 to 14 exams in total. Feel free to buy more practices if it fits your budgets and schedules.?

Many practice exams do not resemble the real exams well. For example, the practices I used have very few case study questions. You can find anecdotal information online about which practice contains case study questions.?

There is no need to worry about the level of similarity. The goal is to get familiar with the study material; even dissimilar questions can make ends meet.?

-Write practice exams

Depending on your level of proficiency, I split the process into four stages – Treasure Hunt, Educated Guess, Timed Challenge, and Full Marathon.?

In the first three stages, you practice and review one section in one sitting. There are four sections in the Barrister exam and three in the Solicitor exam, and you only focus on one topic at a time. You put everything together in the last stage.

First Stage – Treasure Hunt:

In this stage, you aim to finish just one UNTIMED section in a sitting. For each question, search thoroughly to find the answer from the printed study materials with the help of the printed ToC, charts or indices. This stage aims to improve your familiarity with the materials and the searching process. Focus on accuracy, not time. You may skip this stage if you are very familiar with a section's content.

If you are stuck on a question, you can use computer searching, aka Ctrl/Command+F, but you must then physically flip your paper material to that page and read the answer. If Ctrl+F won’t help, Google it. The first stage is to improve your familiarity, so don’t feel guilty using the computer.

Finally, submit your answers, review the feedback, and move to the next section until you finish all the sections in an exam.?

Second Stage – Educated Guess:

After you have a basic familiarity with the material, you need to cultivate your Educated Guess. It is an important trick to save your time and answer the questions without flipping the pages.?

The educated guess is a guess based on your knowledge, experience and gut feeling. The more familiar you are with the materials, the more accurate your guess will be. The “Educated Guess” differs from the blind guesses. The latter means you make a random choice without reading questions or nothing in the question rings a bell, and you lend your fate to pure luck. The Fortuna seldom smiles upon you when taking blind guesses.?

Rather than thoroughly searching everything in the treasure hunt stage, you now try to answer a question without flipping the materials. If you can't guess the answer, then at least guess which chapter the answer may be from and flip to that chapter to locate the answer.?If it is still a miss, go back to thorough searching as that in the first stage.

After you make a guess, note down the question numbers and pay attention to the accuracy during your review. If you guess it wrong, which is normal, you memorize the correct answer and its location so that you won’t lose it next time.?

Third Stage – Timed Challenge:

If your correct rates in untimed practices are consistently above 75%, you can proceed to the “Timed Challenge” stage. You still do practice sections as in the previous stages but with a time limit.?

As a benchmark, each question should take 100 seconds on average. A practice section with 50 questions needs 5000 seconds, about 83 min. You can aim for 80 min and give yourself a 5-minute grace period.?

Fourth Stage – Full Marathon:

You are finally ready for the full marathon. You want to take a timed full exam and train your physical and psychological fortitude to endure the 4.5-hour high intensity. You just need one full marathon so that you don’t deplete your energy before the real exam.??

-Review practice exams

After you finish a section, get the score and review all the questions unless you have answered the same question correctly at least three times. Based on whether you answer a question correctly and how you get to the answer (thorough search or educated guess), there are generally four categories:

• For questions answered correctly by educated guessing, which is ideal, you need to consolidate your guessing process so that you can guess faster next time.?
• For questions answered correctly by thorough searching, you need to remember the rough location of the answer, including its chapter and subtitle so that you can take the shortcut of educated guess when seeing the same question.
• For questions answered wrongly by educated guessing, you need to thoroughly search the material, find the exact location of the answer, and remember its rough location.
• For questions answered wrongly even after a thorough search, which is the most frustrating scenario, you first need to reread the question and see if you comprehend the question. Then use computer searching, Ctrl+F, to find the answer in the materials or in the indices. If you cannot find the answer from the materials, Google it and see if you can find a clue. If still nothing, ignore the question and move on – life is too short for such enigmas.

Two types of questions you need to pay attention to – a) RP questions: you need to notice the issues and parties in those questions and how they affect the choices;? b) Legalese: many questions contain legalese without explanation, such as “res gestae", and you need to understand their meanings.?

If you have finished 4 to 7 full exams and have run out of new ones, you can redo exams under time limits rather than buying new ones. Every revision reinforces your muscle memory to identify the issues, flip the pages, and locate the answers.

Before the exam

You are on the eve of the exam. Tips like “have a good sleep” are meaningless – if only they were as easy as the Bar exams. Instead, the followings are more practical:?

1. Pack snacks and beverages.?Healthy diets are NOT a priority in the exam (but a priority during exam preparation). Snacks should be high in simple sugar to keep your brain running and high in fats to calm your stomach. The food should also fit the package requirements. Make sure your beverages have no leakage. Possible choices include cookies, jerkies, milk chocolate bars, lemonades, and sugary sports drinks (not energy drinks!).?Avoid cheesecakes, tarts, and cannolis, whose cheese and cream may taint your hands and the scanning card. Avoid coffee and energy drinks, whose caffeine increases your anxiety and gives you nature calls. Don’t drink more than one cup of coffee that morning.
2. You may consider wearing a diaper to save your bathroom time. For example, in the Toronto Congress Centre exam site, a bathroom visit usually takes three minutes – two questions’ time.
3. Be there an hour early and meditate — you don’t want to be stuck in traffic.

During the exam

You pass the security and have all your materials checked. You are given a wristband, seated, and listening to the announcement. Soon after, an exam question book with a scanning card (called Scantron) is dropped before you. You open it, and the clock starts counting down.

If you have practiced a sufficient amount of questions, there is no need to fear the real Bar game. Nonetheless, there are some crucial things to bear in mind:?

1. Mark your option on the card while answering the question. Many like to label the answers on the question book first and then transfer them to the scanning card at the end. Apparently, the latter is prone to errors during the mass migration of the answers, and your exam time would be 5 min shorter than others.?
2. Make sure you mark the correct question and intended option every single time – mark wrongly and your efforts are gone with the wind. When you finish, you must check if you stop just at number 160, and no blanks before number 160.?
3. Monitor your time every 10 questions. As said above, each question allows 100 seconds on average; every 10 questions should take about 15 min, and every 40 questions should take about an hour. If you are behind in the previous 10 questions, you need to speed up in the next 10 questions.
4. Set a hard time limit, like 3 min, on every question. If you have stayed on a question for 3 min, take an educated guess and move on. It’s more important to finish all the questions than getting the absolutely right answer for each question. When time runs out and you have 20 questions left blank or you have to guess those questions blindly, you can kiss your exam goodbye.?
5. Don’t take the second “educated” guess when reviewing your answers. In other words, on the first pass, trust your gut feeling; on the second pass, ignore it! You change your answer ONLY IF you are absolutely certain your original answer is wrong or absolutely certain the new answer is correct. If your temptation to change is based on even 10% of guessing or gut feeling, leave it.?