To New York Bar Candidates and Law School Faculty:
I take this opportunity to write and tell you about my classes at BarWrite, Dr. Mary Campbell Gallagher's large-class bar-examination preparation program. My experiences tell me that BarWrite's intervention can help any bar candidate pass the bar examination and can help bring up the bar-exam pass rate at any law school.
I am uniquely qualified to make suggestions about how to pass the New York bar exam. I am an educator with 15 years' experience, and I am a 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School. Although I passed the New Jersey bar immediately, I did not pass the New York exam the first time. I sat through one course of BARBRI, two courses of PMBR, one Marino Retaker course, and two BARBRI Marino essay courses. Finally, I took the 10-day BarWrite course, and it was the only one that made me feel prepared for the New York bar exam. The only course that I now recommend to other people is the BarWrite course, which I loved.
Dr. Gallagher graduated from Harvard Law School in 1974. Perhaps because she holds a Ph.D. in linguistics, BarWrite focuses on logic and systems, and so it is different from the other courses. BarWrite teaches the most-frequently tested rules of law in the ten most-tested areas of law, and it also covers the challenges that haunt New York bar retakers. Designed to be either a supplement to a full bar-review course like Pieper or else a retaker course, it does not assume that one merely lacks knowledge, which other courses assume, but which is often not the problem. I failed the New York bar because I did not know how to handle the different sections on the complicated New York exam. The confusion and anxiety it generated made it impossible for me to pass. My primary problem was timing and format on the essays, but other bar retakers that I met were challenged by handling the MBE questions, by finding the correct issues to address on the essays, or by producing the correct format within the time limits of the MPT tasks. None of the other bar review courses addressed these challenges in a comprehensive or comprehensible way. I was relieved when Dr. Gallagher taught us systems for handling all of them.
BarWrite covered every aspect of the exam. Dr. Gallagher used a number of frequently-tested subjects, starting with contracts, to teach both the law and the fundamentals of bar examination essay-writing. In the 10-day course, we wrote practice New York essays in seven subjects, using special New York class materials and Dr. Gallagher's book Scoring High on Bar Exam Essays. Dr. Gallagher also offered optional teleseminars, where we reviewed especially difficult New York essay questions on the telephone, three times during the course. Two days of the course focused on learning and practicing the BarWrite MBE study system. To make sure students had workable study schedules and to support them in using the MBE study system, BarWrite provided telephone tutoring by practicing lawyers. One day of the course focused on the MPT, for which Dr. Gallagher provides a unique system. Ten-day students were also encouraged to attend two of BarWrite's one-day MPT boot camps, without charge, for an extra study boost. In every class session, Dr. Gallagher addressed timing, conciseness, and logical thinking. By teaching me how to handle the entire New York exam with very specific instructions, BarWrite alleviated my anxiety, which made it easier for me to complete the exam.
Because I was prepared for all of the testing issues I would encounter in the two-day exam, I took the bar in the summer of 2007 confidently, instead of with a queasy stomach. Words cannot express how good it felt to sit in the MBE intellectually analyzing the MBE fact patterns--which is what the BarWrite MBE study system teaches students how to do--instead of panicking over deciding among the answer-choices.
As an educator, I know that Dr. Gallagher's BarWrite program is what enabled me to bring up my score on the New York bar exam to a passing grade. Based on my own experience with BarWrite, I believe that Dr. Gallagher's intervention will help other bar candidates. I believe it will yield additional passers for any law school.
If law schools use the BarWrite courses to target the at-risk students, perhaps by offering an eight- or ten-day class to them during the winter break, seven months before the bar exam, with a three-day refresher course in July, after Pieper and Barbri finish, I feel sure that more students like me—the "almost-passers"—will make the cut and pass the bar exam the first time around.
Yours very truly,
Stephanie Weiss
Brooklyn Law School 2005
Member, New York and New Jersey bars
