Three steps to handle the All India Bar Exam

The All India Bar Exam is expected to be held on December 9, 2012 after some date changes. However, the advocates appearing for the Bar Exam are facing some major problems. In this column, Ramanuj Mukherjee writes about how one should tackle the AIBE..The Bar Council of India (BCI), for the last few instalments of the exam, has been giving out study material to the lawyers fresh out of law school for preparing for the Bar Exam. All questions in the past instalments have been asked from the study material. The problem based questions were all based on examples from the study material. All you needed to do to crack the bar exam was to read this 400 pages study material – just well enough to be able to flip through the pages and find answers to 40-50 questions (out of total 100 questions, one needs to give correct answer to 40 to pass) during the 3.5 hours Bar Exam..This time, as usual, the BCI promised to send preparatory material and charged the students INR 1900 as Bar Exam fee, which usually includes the cost of preparing, printing out and sending the study material to the students..While the exam is barely two weeks away, the BCI has not sent any study material to anyone. The soft copy of the materials used for the earlier Bar Exams, is available for download on the BCI website..So what does all these exactly mean?.Verdict: It’s a mess.Syllabus: The BCI does not provide elaborate syllabus – it just gives a list of subjects. Name of a subject alone is not a good indicator of the syllabus of an exam. For instance, the subject list mentions Law of Contracts. What does one need to study in Law of Contracts to pass the Bar Exam? Should I study only the Contract Act? Should I also read case law? Do I need to read about English cases also or is it just Indian cases that are relevant? Earlier, you just needed to read the 30 odd pages to finish off Law of Contracts from the study material – that was the syllabus. Nothing else was asked. Consider a vast subject like constitutional law – imagine having to read M.P. Jain’s constitutional law text book instead of the concise 30 pages in the study material. Now you are on your own to decide how much you need to read for the Bar Exam unless the BCI comes up with detailed syllabus. It is already too late to announce a detailed syllabus given that the exam is barely two weeks away..Carry in Material: Since all the questions in the exam could be answered from the study material, only thing you needed to carry with you during this open book exam was the study material. In absence of this study material, you need to carry text books and bare acts on 20 law subjects. Throw in the inconvenience of having to flip through tome-sized legal textbooks during the exam instead of the sleek study material. This is not going to be easy..Overall difficulty level: One reason that many students found the Bar Exam to be easy was that it was open book, and that they had a specific study material to prepare from. In absence of study material, it will be much more difficult to prepare for the Bar Exam and the exam would require a lot more attention compared to earlier. I would not be surprised if the pass percentage drops further this year..Action Plan.Given the situation, what can you do?.1. Get hold of the old study material.It would be great if you can get the past years study material from someone who wrote the exam last year, or you can download it from the BCI website. This is probably the most important thing you can do. We do not know if the paper setters will follow previous year’s trend and ask questions directly from this study material but prudence suggests that you study that material thoroughly this year as well..2. Familiarize yourself with the study material.This is the most important aspect in an open book exam – carrying the book with you helps only if you know where in the book you need to look for the answers. If you carry a book with you that you have never read before, the task of finding answers from the book or material will be comparable to the proverbial searching for a pin in the haystack..What I suggest you do to familiarize yourself is this: read through the material at least two times, and then take a few mock tests. While taking the test, use the material and other books you may use during the exam to find answers. As you keep flipping through the pages to find correct answers, your familiarity with the books and ability to locate information will rapidly increase. For instance, you would know exactly where to look in the constitutional law material to find information about anti-defection law or positive discrimination..Old model question paper used for earlier Bar Exams is available for download on the BCI website. At BarHacker, we have a few mock tests you can use for this purpose..This familiarization process is even more important if you are going to write the exam in one language while using the study material or text books written in a different language..3. Set your strategy right.Each question in the exam will carry equal marks, but they are not going to be of equal difficulty level. In the past years, difficulty level of questions varied widely. Some questions were sitters, extremely easy to solve. Some of them were so basic that anyone with a decent knowledge of high school civics will be able to answer them. There were a few questions which were really difficult and it was really time consuming to find their answer from the study material..In this context, understanding that you just need to score 40 marks to pass the exam is very important. The primary objective is not to answer all the 100 questions in the paper. If passing is the only objective, you should find the easiest 40 questions first and answer them before attempting any other..The biggest challenge in an open book exam is managing time. If you are given unlimited time, you can probably answer all questions correctly since you have the books with you. However, your time is limited. Hence the time you can spend looking for answers of each question is also limited. Your goal is to answer 40 questions correctly during the three and half hour exam. Of course, one must attempt more than 40 questions to provide for a safety margin. However, it is clear that answering 50 or 60 questions will high level of accuracy is better than giving not-so-sure answers to 90 questions..Spotting easy questions in the paper is something that one can learn and practice. It is a very useful skill. At BarHacker, we have some dedicated resources that help students to immediately identify easy questions by using certain patterns and tests..Another important thing to keep in mind is that there is no negative marking in the paper. So while you spend majority of your time solving about 60% questions with definitely accurate answers, you should spend 5-10 minutes at the end answering the remaining questions on the best estimate basis. Odds are high that you will in all probability score another 10-15 marks out of this exercise (probability of getting a question right by marking a random answer is 25%, you improve it further by using educated guesses and eliminating obviously wrong options)..At BarHacker, this is the simple strategy we teach to our students:.1. Familiarize yourself with the study material you are going to carry with you,.2. Use stickies, markers and other aids for making finding information easier. Create some indexes while studying (BarHacker students get indexes along with the course).3. Manage time well, do not spend too much time on the few difficult questions and focus on the easy questions.4. Since it is unlikely that you have taken this sort of an open book test before, practice taking some tests like this. Find the past years papers for this. With BarHacker students, we see marked improvement in performance from one test to the next as students start understanding what is required of them to do well in this kind of a test..I hope this would help to give the Bar Exam takers some directions in the middle of all the confusion. .Ramanuj Mukherjee is the founder of BarHacker and legal education startup iPleaders to make law and legal education more accessible in India.