Bar None, Part II
Wherein Our Heroine Finishes Her
Harrowing Tale.
Maine, 1995, the Bar Exam. Mood:
Irritated and Nervous.
...And there were only two
more days of this sort of hell to
come.
Flashing forward to New
Hampshire and the "Multitstate" portion of the test, we enter a whole new
variety of agony. The Multistate is a multiple-choice test. It penalizes you
for wrong answers (taking more points off for wrong answers than for unanswered
ones) and the questions tend to be so finely balanced that the final two choices
a test-taker tends to have are not "Defendant is not guilty because of A," or
"Defendant is not guilty because of B," but rather "Defendant is
not
guilty because of A," or "Defendant is
guilty
because of B." Everyone gets the same questions, but there are two different
scramblings of the order the questions come in - the two versions are handed out
so that the people on either side of you have the other version.
So, I opened the book, poised
my #2 pencil and... question number one was really, really tough. Almost
unanswerable. I think one of the answers contained a legal theory I had never
even heard of. Okay, breathe... On to number two. Number two was really,
really tough. And so it went. Questions 1-25 were so fiendish, I felt like I
had not studied at all. Never entered a law school. Never heard of the law.
Panic.
Then, suddenly,
question #26 was comparatively easier - and the panic started to ebb. Comparing
notes with other test-takers at lunch, it seemed that those of us who got the
version I had all had the same experience. The 25 hardest questions just
happened to be lumped at the beginning. Evil, evil, evil. Guaranteed to throw
the most hardened test-taker completely off of her
game.
Day three - the New
Hampshire State portion. Let me pause a bit and explain what the surroundings
looked like - as opposed to the giant cave of wonders the Maine bar was given
in, the New Hampshire bar was given in the legislative office building. The
individual rooms held 30 or so people, and the chairs were comfy leather - they
tilted and swiveled and didn't make you feel as if your butt and back were on
fire.
So, in such comfortable
surroundings, with an exam that was parceled into nice, neat 1/2 hour questions,
it felt like comparative heaven. And when rain started drumming on the roof,
and I leaned back in the nice, soft chair to take a breather and collect my
thoughts, I almost fell
asleep. It must have been comical to
see me rocket forward in my chair and begin to write feverishly. Yes, it must
have been. Hoo boy - it's almost funny
now.
So, that's my harrowing
tale of the bar. I finished, got my car back, slept like a log for I don't know
how long, and let the world slowly flood back to normal proportions.
And a few months later, I
found out that I had passed.
So much for
drama.
Posted: Thursday - July 29, 2004 at 08:57 AM
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