Very good advice and strategies, but mistakes are distracting

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	• Strategies & Tactics for the MBE (Multistate Bar Exam) Steve Emanuel, Kimm Alayne Walton Aspen Publishers, Inc., 2005 - 628 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This book helped me pass the Bar!!

I bought this book to help me prepare for the MA Bar examination and am so glad that I did. It offers two full length practice exams with questions taken from past MBEs. I thought the questions were a good approximation of the type of questions actually on the exam and I found the strategies section at the front of the book to be very helpful. (I appreciate Kim Alayne's sense of humor too). The answer explanations for each question offered at the end of each test were clear and concise and, in my opinion, far better than those offered by Barbri and PMBR.

I bought this in addition to taking a BarBri course and using a set of PMBR books and found it to be a very valuable supplement. I highly recommend taking as many full-length MBEs as possible and this is a sure-fire way to guarantee that you do at least two.

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The best MBE book around

This is the one book you really need for MBEs. The introductory guides to each section are very clear and easy to understand, a very helpful factor when you are knee deep in Bar Review. The questions are challenging and the answers are very well explained. Outstanding!

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Very good advice and strategies, but mistakes are distracting

The advice in this book is invaluable. It helps you to learn what answer choices are never correct on the bar exam, how the bar examiners try to confuse you (by using analogous situations, for example, that sound a lot like exception-situations, but where the exceptions don't actually apply), strategies for eliminating answer choices when you have no idea, and the main topics tested on the Bar Exam.

The book is set up to help you whether you prepare way ahead of time (and helps you concentrate on the more asked subjects) or prepare way late in the game (tells you what subjects to "punt" if you do not have enough time).

I found the questions they ask are a bit more straight forward than actual bar exam questions, but were very useful for explaining the material. The explanations were the most thorough I've found of any bar exam prep, and the wrong answers are all explained up through the logic of that answer choice being included.

What distracted me while using this were the typos. For the brand (Emmanuel), the typos seemed a bit unusual, and were time consuming. Sometimes, when I was going through some questions quickly, I was confused by all answers being listed as "incorrect" in the back. I had to do a double take at the explanation to realize which ones of these were actually the right answer. The typos aren't rampant, but enough for me to notice and be annoyed at.

Overall, I think this is a great tool for organizing your studying, learning what material to concentrate on and for developing question answering strategies. It does not work alone, and I highly recommend exploring outside of this book to learn the substantive law.

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A Must-Have

Contrary to what another reviewer said, this book doesn't have two full-length exams, or at least not the edition I have (2005). It has the AM and PM sections of a full-length exam.

Other reviews also mention the tips in this book, but the real value in this book is all the actual MBE questions from past exams as well as the explanation to those questions (including the full-length exam). I have found that the barbri and PMBR questions and answer choices are noticeably different much of the time from these past questions and their answer choices. Both companies make their questions long, and barbri's are unnecessarily long. But most actual questions are short. Barbri's explanations are also long and repetitive, whereas the explanations in this book are more concise. Most importantly, these questions are harder than the ones you're doing from barbri and even PMBR. Even the majority of the questions in the one barbri book that has past MBE questions in it are easier in comparison. If you can understand the questions/explanations in this book, you will be prepared for the bar.

As for the tips, I have found around two or three extremely valuable ones in each section that I've read so far. This is not to say the majority of the tips/writing in the book is helpful or that you can use this book without barbri/subject outlines. But the helpful tips that I got out of this book are ones that barbri doesn't spell out and I wouldn't have figured out on my own. Those tips alone really will raise your score, because you will get at least a few more questions right in every single subject from them.

I agree that this book is pricey, but if you can find a cheaper copy somewhere then that's your best bet because you need this book.

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Great Resource

My review is short and to the point. This book is ideal for those wishing to hone their MBE skills. I have been out of law school for several years now and this book will help me prepare to prepare for the bar exam.

I gave it only 4 stars because I believe it is overpriced, but that is common of almost all legal aides.

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