Preparing for the Philippine Bar, without drowning in codals

Bar review has a characteristic failure mode, and it is not laziness. It is a reviewee who reads diligently for months, covers every subject, annotates every codal, finishes the syllabus — and cannot produce the four requisites of anything under time pressure in a room in November.

The problem is that coverage and recall are different achievements, and almost every review schedule is built to produce the first one.

Coverage is a plan you can finish. Recall is not

A coverage plan is deeply appealing because it is legible. You can draw it on a calendar, tick subjects off, and know exactly how far behind you are. Recall does not decompose like that.

You do not finish remembering Remedial Law. You either produce the doctrine on demand in November or you do not.

So the honest question to ask of any block of review time is not did I get through it but could I produce this now, closed book, in the form the examiner wants it.

Most reviewees never ask that question until a mock exam does it for them, which is usually far too late to change the method.

What the evidence says to do instead

The two study techniques with the strongest general support are testing yourself and spreading practice out over time. In a review of ten common techniques, those two were the only ones rated high utility across subjects and levels of prior knowledge; re-reading, highlighting and summarising were rated low.

Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The full table of what that review rated is in the retrieval practice guide.

Combine them — retrieve until you get it right, then return after a gap, repeatedly — and you get the technique called successive relearning, which in a real course produced more than a letter grade of improvement.

Rawson & Dunlosky (2022), Current Directions in Psychological Science.

This maps onto bar review almost too neatly, because the bar is a recall exam under time pressure and almost nothing else.

Restructuring a review week

You do not need to abandon a coverage schedule. You need to stop letting it be the whole plan.

1. 1

   Read once, then convert

   The first pass through a subject is for understanding, and re-reading it is where most of the wasted months go. After that pass, convert the material into questions — elements, requisites, exceptions, distinctions, periods. Write the question, not the answer.

2. 2

   Make closed-book production the default activity

   If your codal is open, you are reading, not reviewing. Most of the hours should be spent producing doctrine onto a blank page and then checking it.

3. 3

   Keep a miss list, and let it drive the schedule

   Anything you could not produce goes on a list with tomorrow’s date. Anything you produced correctly goes on the list with a date about a week out. That list, not the syllabus, decides what you do each morning.

4. 4

   Write under a clock earlier than feels comfortable

   Recall under time pressure is a distinct skill from recall. Practising it in October and discovering the gap in November is the wrong order.

The distinctions that decide answers

A large share of bar questions turn on a boundary rather than a definition: which court, which period, which of two similar remedies, whether a right attaches at this moment or the next one. Definitions are comparatively easy to recall and comparatively rarely decisive on their own.

So bias your self-testing towards the boundaries. Instead of what is X, ask how is X different from Y, and what fact changes the answer. Those are harder to write and harder to answer, which is a reasonable sign that they are the right questions.

On mock exams

Take them earlier and treat the result as diagnosis rather than verdict. A mock exam in the last fortnight can only tell you how you are going to do. One taken months out can still change it, because you have time to act on what it reveals.

The most useful output of a mock is not the score. It is the list of things you were confident about and wrong about — the most expensive category there is, because you will not revisit them unless something forces you to.

A word on burnout

Retrieval-based review is more tiring per hour than reading is. That is the cost of it working. It also means the honest version of this advice includes fewer hours, not more — a shorter day of closed-book production will generally beat a longer day of reading, and it is more survivable across the months a bar review actually takes.

Where Mento fits

The mechanical parts of this are what break down first under fatigue: writing the questions, tracking the miss list, remembering what is due. Mento generates practice questions from material you upload, gives graduated hints instead of an answer button, and brings solved problems back on an expanding schedule so the miss list maintains itself.

It does not know Philippine law, and it is not a review centre. It reads the material you give it. The underlying method works with paper and a calendar too, and the method is the part that matters.

For four other coverage-defined exams — the UPCAT, the nursing board, LET, and the civil service exam — Mento already holds the published scope and has written a reviewer for every topic in it, one of them free to read. See those reviewers.