How much do I need to study?

Aside from stating the obvious — that is, that you DO need to study — there’s no right answer here. That said, we can tell you what worked for us when we wrote the Ontario bar exam. Our strategy by no means guarantees success, but it DID work for us in that we were able to pass both the barrister and solicitor examinations on our first attempts.

When we wrote the Ontario bar exam, we essentially treated studying as a full time job. Monday-Friday, 9-5, we were studying. We made SURE to take evenings and weekends off, however, so that we didn’t burn ourselves out. The fact of the matter is that the bar exam materials can be pretty dull and so if you don’t take a break you WILL burn out.

What do we mean by “studying”, though? Studying for us meant reading all of the materials once. It also meant RE-READING whatever chapters we found more difficult to follow, as well as all of the professional responsibility chapters. Almost every bar exam prep website notes this but it’s true and so we’re going to repeat it here: do NOT underestimate the importance of professional responsibility. (For those of you who want to focus on studying the professional responsibility material specifically, we have a test focused SOLELY on the materials contained in those chapters).

A lot of bar exam advice also discusses the importance of highlighting. We adhered to this advice in that we also highlighted our materials. That said, none of us used complex colour-coded highlighting systems. Rather, if a piece of information seemed important, we’d highlight it. In fact, if we’re being totally honest, highlighting was just a way to ensure that we were maintaining focus while reading the materials. In other words, your highlighting strategy is NOT going to make or break your success on test day.

In our next blog post, we’ll discuss some other studying strategies that students commonly rely upon!