1. Home
  2. Bar Exam MPT Preparation & Experiential Learning for Law Students

Bar Exam MPT Preparation & Experiential Learning for Law Students

2nd Edition
Sara J. Berman
ISBN: 9781641057585
Subject: Bar Exam Success
Format: Print & Electronic - Softbound
Page Count: 289
Copyright: 2021 | Status: In Stock

Bar Exam MPT Preparation & Experiential Learning for Law Students provides the tools faculty need to use performance tests for formative assessment and to innovatively fulfill a number of important ABA standards. See also Berman, Sara Integrating Performance Tests into Doctrinal Courses, Skills Courses, and Institutional Benchmark Testing: A Simple Way to Enhance Student Engagement While Furthering Assessment, Bar Passage, and Other ABA Accreditation Objectives, Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2018 at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3206929.

One key metric for law schools is bar passage, but legal education must also produce ethical, motivated, client-centered practice ready professionals. Evidence suggests that early infusion of performance tests (PTs) to aid in training critical lawyering skills during law school will help law students pass the bar exam, train practical skills, and develop their professional identities. With this book, you can easily—with as much or as little time as you have—incorporate experiential learning exercises into core doctrinal courses including contracts, torts, criminal law, criminal procedure, civil procedure, real property, family law, and others.

The book is also a ready-made text for bar success courses —as is for stand-alone MPT courses, or paired with Bar Exam Success: A Comprehensive Guide for courses that include essay and MBE preparation as well as learning science and growth mindset, self-directed learning, interventions for high performing and at-risk students alike, and more.

PTs are excellent law school teaching tools: 1) PTs provide excellent experiential learning opportunities, to build skills and cultivate professionalism, 2) PTs serve as a useful assessment tool to measure students’ competency in basic lawyering skills including critical reading, legal analysis, factual analysis, awareness of professional responsibility, and problem solving, 3) PTs help prepare students for success on the bar exam, and 4) PTs spark student engagement.

Please consult the faculty teaching guide that includes sample syllabi and rubrics, and feel free to contact the author for ideas on how to integrate PTs into your law school courses. Also, connect with Sara Berman on Twitter @PASSLawProf.


Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: Other
Publication Date: 02/08/2021

Sara J. Berman, University of Southern California Gould School of Law

CasebookPlus™

This title is available in our CasebookPlus format. CasebookPlus provides support beyond your classroom lectures and materials by offering additional digital resources to you and your students. Anchored by faculty-authored formative self-assessments keyed to our most popular casebooks, CasebookPlus allows students to test their understanding of core concepts as they are learning them in class – on their own, outside of the classroom, with no extra work on your part. CasebookPlus combines three important elements:

  • A new print or digital casebook
  • Access to a downloadable eBook with the ability to highlight and add notes
  • 12-month access to a digital Learning Library complete with:
Multiple-choice self-assessment questions, including:
  • Chapter questions keyed to the casebook
  • Black Letter Law questions (available in select subjects)
  • Subject area review questions for end of semester use
Essay and short answer questions with sample answers and expert commentary, in 1L and select upper-level subjects

Leading digital study aids, an outline starter, and audio lectures in select subjects

Students can still utilize CasebookPlus digital resources if they’ve purchased a used book or are renting their text by purchasing the Learning Library at westacademic.com.

With CasebookPlus, you can customize your students’ learning experience and monitor their performance. The quiz editor allows you to create your own custom quiz set, suppress specific quiz questions or quiz sets, and time-release quiz questions. Additionally, the flexible, customized reporting capability helps you evaluate your students’ understanding of the material and can also help your school demonstrate compliance with the new ABA Assessment and Learning Outcomes standards.

Learn more about this series.

“I encourage any law student planning to take a Bar exam that includes Multistate Performance Tests (MPTs) to buy, read, and follow the advice in Sara Berman’s book, Bar Exam MPT Preparation & Experiential Learning for Law Students. As our law school’s director of par pass initiatives, I have taught a course on MPTs for several years. At first, I struggled to find materials and had to cobble them together. Now I can assign what I consider the best book I have read on MPT Bar preparation. I favor Ms. Berman’s book for several reasons. First, she throughout espouses a philosophy to which I also subscribe. That philosophy is this: the Bar need not be viewed as a period of torture to be endured. Instead, those seeking to be a lawyer can choose to view the Bar as an opportunity to prepare for law practice. Second, and related to the first point, Ms. Berman’s book demonstrates how practicing for—and ultimately mastering—MPTs is an experiential learning opportunity. Unlike multiple choice and essays that are important as educational tools, MPTs not only test knowledge of rules and application of facts to the rules, but also how well someone can do what lawyers do. Lawyers write opinion letters, objective memoranda, briefs, and many other legal tasks. The process of practicing for and taking MPTs will help the Bar taker to prepare for the practice of law. Third, Ms. Berman’s book offers an excellent strategy for Bar takers to solve the major problem in answering MPTs—i.e., preparing for and completing a task in the limited time allotted. She provided a step-by-step approach that, in my judgment, offers the most logical and efficient way one could use one’s time in writing an MPT answer. Fourth, Ms. Berman goes even further in offering chapters on the substantive areas typically associated with MPTs. Here, she allows a student to understand the basics of the area of law and then to address sample MPTs. Finally, the book does a great service in offering many sample MPTS on which a Bar taker can practice. One of the themes in all of Ms. Berman’s books, one which I again share, is that practice is the key to success on the Bar exam. I am grateful to Ms. Berman for writing this book. I’m confident I will not be alone.”
—Benjamin V. Madison, III, Professor and Director of Bar Pass Initiatives, Regent University School of Law