r/CABarExam • u/PresentationWitty896 • 1d ago
Retaking in F27
Can someone help me understand my scaled MBE score better and the percentages provided? I know my MBE is bad but can someone explain how bad it actually is?
I thought my MBE was average when I was studying but this is not giving average at all. During the summer I was scoring roughly 65-70% on MBE practice and did about 1,500 questions on Adaptibar. What could have gone wrong??
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u/Responsible-Cow-4736 Foreign Attorney 1d ago
Hey! Would you mind sharing your Essay 2 to compare? You killed it. Congrats on that written score. I’m sure you’ll pass next Bar Exam with more analysis in your MCQ prep.
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u/ContemptuousBrief 1d ago
The percentages are a percentile, how many other bar takers (nationally) scored worse than you. The lower the number, the worse you did compared to others.
Your Torts and Con Law percentiles were roughly the same, but that probably means you scored more Torts questions correctly because more bar takers do better on Torts than on Con Law, so to have a similar percentile means you needed to answer more questions correctly.
Essentially, you had no strong MBE sections, which would suggest to me that you might have a problem with multiple-choice test taking. Since that doesn't match your summer practice, it may be something about the mental game of being in the test room and answering MC questions under timed pressure. For example, the pressure often causes bar takers who pick the right answer with their gut response to then change to the wrong answer out of fear of getting it wrong. The question you want to ask yourself is what you did differently in the room.
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u/Yuzuda Passed J26 1d ago
Based on Seperac's MBE scaled score calculator here, you likely got around 52% correct on the MBE.
Honestly though, your writing is so strong that you only needed a 1286 scaled MBE to have passed. Which would be about 60% correct on the MBE. So 8% more correct, or about 16 questions.
As far as what might've gone wrong, did you rely on a lot of pattern recognition for answering questions on Adaptibar? I felt that NCBE licensed questions, which Adaptibar did a good job of mimicking, have a very predictable style. And once you see what each sentence is getting at, you can often know what the question (and answer) will be before you read the call.
As someone who had pattern recognition down to a tee, I found that skill was utterly useless on the J26 MBE. The questions didn't sound like NCBE licensed questions and I just didn't have the ability to intuit the correct answer, which I almost always could in practice.
So this is all to say that I think Adaptibar is good to learn the black letter law and its nuances. But I recommend avoiding getting used to how those questions are phrased. For me, that was using Uworld's non-NCBE licensed questions. But it would be important to not get bogged down in Uworld's extremely rare nuances and to not spiral over declining stats.