Critical Pass: Getting To The Core Of What You Need To Know To Pass The Bar Exam

If you’re preparing for the bar exam, by now you’re all too aware that people are full of opinions about what you need to do to pass and which courses you need to take. Whatever strange routines and magic tricks might have worked for someone else, though, won’t necessarily work for you.

Let’s be honest – there’s a huge universe of material that might potentially show up on the bar exam and there’s no way anyone can learn it all in the time you have to prepare. At the end of the day, the best bar exam prep is about studying what’s most often tested on the exam, and doing it in a way that works with how you learn.

Enter Critical Pass. With Critical Pass as a supplement in your bar prep arsenal, you’ll be in the best position to learn the things you actually need to know in order to pass.

A New Take on an Old Standby

Flashcards have been a tried-and-true learning technique for decades, and for good reason – they work when used correctly. The original beauty of flashcards was that you made them yourself and included the information you needed to learn, the way you liked to learn it.

As companies started marketing flashcards as study aids, some were more successful than others and some ignored the very thing that made flashcards so great in the first place. Most bar exam flash cards throw too much information at you with no way to make it your own. Even worse, many of those flashcards are based on dubious source materials or “official” bar exam questions that have been retired.

Critical Pass is different, and it gives you the best of both worlds. You get comprehensive flashcards that are focused on the subjects you actually need to know to pass the exam, with room for you to add your own notes, memory devices, and other content that will help you remember what you need to know the way you need to see it.

A New Level of Flashcard-Based Learning

Critical Pass offers flashcards for both the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) and the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE). When you sign up for Critical Pass, you have the option to get traditional, paper flashcards, which come with a year of free access to the Critical Pass digital platform and mobile app, or digital-only access.

Regardless of the format you choose, for the MBE there are currently 375 flashcards covering the key subjects that are most often tested on the bar exam.

Similarly, for essay practice, Critical Pass includes 117 flashcards on popular essay topics.

Click into any topic (or pull out your paper card), and you get an outline-style overview of the basic elements and concepts that are often tested on the bar exam. You can alter the color scheme and font size on the digital version to your liking, as well as highlight text. Most importantly, there’s a box on every flashcard where you can take your own notes and add your favorite memory aids for when you’re reviewing the card again later or quizzing yourself (more on quizzes in a bit).

Your notes and highlights stay in the system, so every time you pull up a card for review, you can see the work you’ve already invested in learning that topic.

In addition to the bar exam, Critical Pass offers flashcard packs for the MPRE and for general law school study, both backed up by the same digital access you can choose for the bar flashcards.

Quiz Yourself

Practice quizzes and tests are a critical part of pretty much all bar exam prep, and Critical Pass gives you a few options for self-quizzing.

Within Critical Pass, you can create custom quizzes from the MBE flashcards, the MEE flashcards, or both, and narrow your quiz down to certain subject matters. You can choose to be quizzed on just the flashcards or on pre-existing questions created by Critical Pass (1600 in total), and choose whether you want to be quizzed sequentially or at random.

Say, for example, you’re focusing on hearsay today. One option is to just have the hearsay flashcards presented to you. If you select questions rather than just flashcards, you’re presented with a question and the option to see that question alongside the highlighted relevant flashcard text that answers the question.

You can also jump directly to the full card to review your notes and the entire topic. You can always search within cards and save certain cards to go back to later by clicking the star button at the top.

In addition to the quiz function, Critical Pass gives you access to the current licensed questions from the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

Many bar prep products claim to include official questions, but many of those questions have been retired by the NCBE, meaning they’re not reflective of what’s currently being tested on the bar exam. The NCBE currently licenses about 650 questions – those are the ones Critical Pass has, and they give them to you along with the NCBE’s answer explanations, either immediately after the question or at the end of all questions (it’s your choice). In addition to answer explanations, you can also jump straight to the Critical Pass flashcard for any question.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by bar exam prep – not even just by the exam itself, but by the sheer number of options that are out there when it comes to study aids and courses. There are lots of quick, digital products on the market that just dump information on you with no way to make it your own and no way to be sure what you actually need to focus on.

What makes Critical Pass the perfect supplement for overarching, comprehensive bar exam courses is that it boils down the giant universe of potential bar subjects to exactly what you need to know and commit to memory in order to pass. While the test varies from year to year, the core issues tend to be consistent. Critical Pass focuses on those issues in order to put you in the best position to pass.