Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as bad as CA’s exam. There are only two days. Day 1 is 12 essay questions. They are pretty intense b/c you only have 30 minutes to answer each one. And don’t think they are short little paragraphs! Many of them actually “spilled over” onto a second page! That blew me away b/c CA’s exam questions are almost always limited to one single page for each question.

What was crazy is that AZ would actually expect you to generate some kind of decent answer in 30 minutes. I felt like I could have easily spent a full hour on each question! Some of them were serious “race horse” questions. For example, question #12 on the exam was a contracts questions that had THREE different contracts in the problem and you had to discuss all of them. In 30 minutes?!?!

The second day was the MBE, which has gotten much harder over the years, FYI. I studied REALLY hard for the MBE- and if I were you, I would do the same. See, if you do especially well on it, the extra points will help you on your essays if you need them. The only downside is that the MBE is only worth 33% of the points in AZ. However, the really cool thing about AZ is that they tell you your MBE score BEFORE they tell you if you pass or fail the entire exam. This is the only state in the U.S. that does this! So, about 4 weeks after the AZ bar, you get a letter that just tells you your MBE score, which is really nice b/c every other person in the country doesn’t know anything. Also, make sure you do at least 1,500 MBE questions to get a minimum of 145. The letter that came out a couple weeks ago said the mean MBE score in AZ was 145! That’s pretty high. You don’t want to pull out a 130-something and already be in the hole! The real key to the MBE is doing 25 questiosn a day and REALLY understanding HOW you got to the right or wrong answer. Spend 2-3 hours a day on the MBE and annotate each question so that you REALLY understand what it’s about. The scary thing is that on the July 2007 MBE, there were issues I have NEVER seen on an MBE question- and I have done easily 2,000 practice question- both Barbri and PMBR!

Anyway, AZ’s pass rate is pretty high. It’s a little confusing b/c it’s reported differently on different sites. The National Counsel of Bar Examiners (ncbe) posts AZ’s pass rate at 89% for 2006. However, the AZ Supreme Court homepage says it was 65% or so. I’m not sure what is going on with the math, but it’s definitely higher than CA’s 30-50% pass rate!

Whatever bar you sit for, they’re all hard. Just be happy that AZ has NO performance test, which you really can’t study for b/c it’s more of a skill than a knowledge test! Also, it seems like a lot of people I ran into in AZ didn’t really study that hard. Several people I met told me that they didn’t start studying until the beginning of July!!!! 25 days to study for the bar? Good luck with that!

Hope this helps you out!

Good luck!

ADA