Pebbles...

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.

~Author Unknown

I started studying MBEs last night. It sucked hard core, and this morning I just wanted to cry when I got to work.

But enough whining. My strategy this time, since I'd like to get 10-15 more raw points on the MBE, is to go through the questions methodically, and make my own MBE flashcards. This entails reading the question, reading the answers, going immediately to the answer key and reading all the explanations, and then making a flashcard that epitomizes what the question is testing and what rule the question is looking for me to conjure up.

My main problem is that I know the rules, but when faced with weird answer choices that seem like they don't answer the question, then I am stumped and am forced to guess. And I always guess wrong. On the February bar, I distinctly remember a question where a guy injured a woman by hitting her with his car. She had to have a kidney transplant because of her injuries. Her mother donated a kidney. The question asked under what circumstances would the guy be liable to the mother.

I looked at that question for probably three minutes during the test. Hell if I knew... it just didn't make any sense. My husband, who is far better at the MBE than me, said that it turned on the answer choice that said something like, "if he owed a duty to the mother." To me, that's a weird answer. Maybe because I do tort law for a living, I think there are so many factors involved in that question that I need more information and I can't answer that question based on three sentences of a fact pattern.

Therein lies my problem on the MBE. My husband says I overthink it. I'm sure he's right.

Thus, the flashcards. Last time, I sat for hours and hours with my conviser, actively condensing information into bits that I could remember later. When I got down to my two week mark, I started memorizing by repeating them over and over while walking on the treadmill. It sucked, but it sure did work, and on the essays, I knew the rule statements off my flashcards cold.

So, I figure, worked for the essays, the repetition of doing it this way has to work on the MBE. Even if I don't get through every kind of question there is, if I have 300-500 cards completely memorized, that could easily get me the extra points I'm looking for. I know my essays are there. I just need to refresh.

Then there's the PT. Not sure what to do with that, except maybe stop worrying about it. The more I try to follow advice and do the PT a "certain way", the worse my scores on them become. Who knows. I'll get to that when I get to it. For now, I've made a plan, and I'm workin' my plan.