Raise the Bar

Failing the California bar exam was like a grenade going off in my face. I was shell-​shocked — my self-​confidence in my ability to pass was shattered, and my stress about the test and my career were off the charts. Having trudged through Barbri the first time around, I knew I needed a more personalized experience the second. A colleague who had failed the first time (both of us from the same top 10 law school) recommended Raise the Bar Writing and Belia Bennett. I don’t know how I would have passed without her.
I interviewed several tutors. Belia’s credentials stood out: she had been a California bar exam grader for two administrations of the test. This showed later when I felt like I was getting almost unfair insight into the grading process.
Belia, who had previously worked at a couple of law firms, sets out a very intensive eight– or 10-​week schedule of studying and essay-​writing. She does not lecture on black-​letter law; she assumes students have access to that from their past experience with Barbri or other services. The schedule is basically a day-​by-​day framework she sets out for all her students (she had roughly a dozen of us, including two from UC Berkeley Law and one from Harvard Law), but she immediately customized it to my life — I was working for part of the process — and my needs. Belia reviewed my essays from my failed exam, interviewed me about my experience in law school and assessed my strengths and weaknesses. The schedule for any given week would include reviews of several subjects; essay-​writing on several subjects; and MBE questions. A few days after she received my practice essays or performance tests, she turned them back around to me with detailed comments and, usually, the grade she would have given each one. This is priceless feedback. But the most important part of the process for me was the 90-​minute one-​one-​one sessions we had weekly to review these exams and anything else that arose. (Though she lives in Napa, she met separately with several students each week in San Francisco.)
Belia’s command of the law astonished me, not only in her written feedback but in our in-​person sessions. She had a unique ability to quickly find a rule of law in her head, articulate it and explain it clearly. We would play a game I called «Stump Belia,» and I always lost. She is simply authoritative on California bar exam law. More importantly, she knows how to make even complex and obscure law understandable, and she knows where the bar examiners set the traps. She knows how to manage clients whose heads are exploding with stress and fear. Most important of all: Belia’s passage rate this cycle was over 90 percent.
As for the MBE, Belia offered good guidance, but basically gave that portion of the tutoring over to Adaptibar, an excellent online service that provides access to nearly 2,000 certified (either previously given or approved to give) MBE questions, answers and detailed explanations. I found that pounding on these questions week after week got me «into the head» of the MBE question-​writers, and got me on the right pace to finish all the questions. These questions were much better than the Barbri MBE quesions in that they were more similar to the ones I actually faced. Like other bar tutors, Belia gets her students a break on the cost of Adaptibar.
Belia’s services require an application, and they don’t come cheap. But for the joy and relief I feel right now at having passed, it was worth every penny.