Are practice questions in bar review courses typically more difficult than questions on the actual exam?

Answer 1

It depends on what part of the exam you are referring to and your bar prep company. All bar prep companies should be using real, past practice essays and performance tests. Those questions are representative of difficulty level. Another task you can do is look at past bar exam essays in totality on your state jurisdiction's website. It's a good idea to look at a given administration's essays so you get a sense of the varied difficulty of essays given together.

For MBE problems, this is really a difficult question. Most bar prep companies use all of the actual released questions but there are only about 1400 of them. Any company that has beyond that number has written additional questions. The process the NCBE employee for writing the bar exam MBE questions is incredibly extensive (to give you an idea, a minimum of 5 subject matter experts review each question) and the NCBE does not release many. Many of us that teach in bar prep are of the opinion that MBE questions are getting increasingly difficult; however, we cannot see the questions until the NCBE releases them. Nonetheless, based on my own experience and what I have heard from the hundreds of students I have worked with and taught over the last several years, the MBE questions bar prep companies provide do adequately prepare students for the exam.