The question I keep going over in my head: Is there something I would not be able to write some sort of essay response on?

Short answer: I don't think so. Longer answer: I worry about freezing up.

During this process, we've seen nothing but very good essays as answer exemplars. I really want to know what a 55 looks like, what a 65 looks like, and what a 75 looks like. I feel that seeing only 80s or 85s (or whatever they are, since we don't know) makes it too hard to know what we should do when we fake it.

Or, maybe I actually don't want to know. I sure think I do, though.

I can understand why BAR/BRI is reluctant to give us lower scoring sample answers at the outset of our studies: they want us to aim high. However, I wholeheartedly agree that it would be nice it they would release some 55's and 65's and so on in the last couple of weeks.

That said, I still think that we can all pass the exam without knowing all of the millions of distinctions and minutiae. Given the holistic approach to grading, it would be a really strange civ pro essay where the bulk of the points were decided by the difference between the number of days to file an answer.

Have you tried the Remedies question - I think it's #6 - requiring only Trust remedies for the answer? Yuck.

Totally agree, otherwise. I like having a high bar set, but I'm sure that Bar/Bri knows exactly how they'd grade most papers. If they gave us a set of sample answers in each score range with a few reasons as to why they were graded as they were, it would be really helpful.

Oh well. Nothing to do now but kill the test.

"Have you tried the Remedies question - I think it's #6 - requiring only Trust remedies for the answer? Yuck."

That question did suck. I think I tried it before I even knew what a purchase money trust was. Yikes! Still, while there have been a few outlier questions in almost every topic, I'm guessing that 4 or 5 of the bar essays will be in the sweet spot. I bet that I'll probably bomb one essay, kill another and do a mediocre job on the rest.

However, having recently taken Legal Drafting, I suspect that I'll make up a decent amount of points there. Think about this: if you get a couple of 70's on the PTs, you can score 120 raw on the MBE and then only have to average a little above 59 on all the rest of the essays.