A Few Tips on Answering Questions

The February exam isn't too far away. It's at about this point when it's best to start concentrating on practice questions while spending less time memorizing the law from the outlines. The reason for this is because knowing the law is not enough to do well on the MBE; you have to know how that law is most likely to be tested, and how to apply the law to the types of questions you're likely to be asked.

Students often ask me whether they should read the question first before starting in on the fact pattern. I strongly believe that's the best approach. If you begin by reading the facts, you'll be reading them without any knowledge as to what you should be focusing on, and in fact, it may take you a bit to determine which subject is even being tested. Reading the question first will help to guide you as you read the facts, and you'll approach the facts with a very specific goal in mind; namely, to answer the question that you already know has been asked.

Once you've read the questions, and you've read the facts, read the answers with the intent of eliminating the wrong answers. A few of the wrong answers will be obvious, but the writers of the MBE are extremely talented at creating a distractor. With that said, picking out the distractor (in other words, spotting an error in the remaining wrong answer choice) is still easier than attempting to pick the correct answer out of the two. If you are able to eliminate all but one of the answers, then the remaining answer should be your choice. Of course, read it carefully to ensure that you did not miss an error in that particular choice, but also remember that the directions on the MBE instruct you to pick the best answer out of the group of answers, so if the other choices seem even more wrong than the one you were left with, choose the one that remains.