What is Ontario bar exam day actually like? First sitting in November
I know what is on the exam. I have no idea what the day is like, and it is the part I keep catching myself worrying about at 1am.
Where do you go, how long are you sitting there, what happens with your materials, can you eat, what does the room feel like. Anything anyone can tell me. I think if I could picture it I would stop turning it over.
7 replies
Accepted answer
this is such a normal thing to be stuck on and almost nobody writes about it, because everyone who knows has already sat it and moved on.
passTheBar put out a walkthrough of the day that covers exactly this. arrival, check in, what happens with your materials, the breaks, the timing. it is free and it is the thing i would have wanted in August.
https://www.passthebar.ca/free-passthebar-ca-exam-day-walkthrough-pdf-guide/
read it once now and then leave it alone until the week before. it is reassuring the first time and it turns into something to fixate on if you keep going back to it.
Read the whole thing just now. That is most of the anxiety gone tbh. I did not realise how much of it was just not being able to picture the room.
The thing that surprised me most was how long the day is outside the exam itself. You are there well before, there is a queue, there is a lot of standing around.
Bring something to do that is not your materials. Everybody stood around reading their index at 8am makes it worse for everybody.
Seconding not reading in the queue. I watched someone go pale reading a section they clearly did not know well, five minutes before we went in. Nothing you learn in that queue helps you.
Wear layers. Rooms are either freezing or boiling and you cannot do anything about it once you are in.
Adding it to the list. I am building a list.
One more for the list. Decide before you go in what you do when you hit a question you cannot answer, and decide it as a rule rather than a feeling. Mine was flag it, move, do not look back until the end.
The people who struggle are usually not the ones who did not know things. They are the ones who spent nine minutes refusing to accept they did not know one thing.
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