Failed the barrister exam in June. What should I do differently for the rewrite?
Results came back and I did not pass. Barrister, first attempt, and from what I can tell I was a few percent off.
I am not really here for sympathy, I am here because I do not want to repeat the same four months. Things I already know I did badly:
- Read the materials cover to cover twice and did almost no practice questions until the last fortnight
- Index was enormous and I could not find anything in it under time
- Never once did a full sitting in one go
If you passed on a rewrite, what did you actually change. Trying to build the November plan out of real advice rather than vibes.
8 replies
Rewrote in November after failing the June before, so I have been exactly here.
The single biggest change was flipping the ratio. First time round I did maybe 80 percent reading and 20 percent questions. Second time it was closer to 30 and 70, and I started questions in week one when I still felt like I knew nothing.
It feels awful for about two weeks. You get everything wrong. But you start learning where things live in the materials and reading just does not do that for you.
That is the bit I keep hearing and keep resisting. Doing questions before I have read properly feels like I am cheating myself out of the learning.
You are not being tested on whether you know it, you are being tested on whether you can find it. An hour of reading without looking anything up is an hour of not doing that.
Also failed once. Second thing after questions was cutting the index down rather than building it up. Mine went from about 90 pages to 40 and my times improved immediately. Everything I cut was material I could find fast anyway.
Rough rule I used. If I had looked something up twice and found it without the index both times, it came out.
Sorry about June. A few percent is brutal specifically because it means the studying broadly worked and something else did not.
The full timed sitting is the one I would fix first. I did two before June and both times I came apart somewhere around question 90 in a way that never once happened in a 30 question block. You cannot find that out on the day.
Yeah. I think I avoided the full sittings because I knew they would go badly and I did not want the evidence.
Not a rewrite, but as someone sitting for the first time in November, threads like this are worth more than any guide. Thank you for writing it out.
Update a week and a bit in. Questions from day one. Got 54 percent on the first block and did not spiral about it, which is new. Index being rebuilt from scratch and staying under 45 pages this time.
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