Had it not been for Steven, I don’t know if I would have passed on my second try. In fact, I really do believe that had I hired Steven the for my first try, I likely would’ve passed!
Let me start by saying that, before law school, I taught for five years — all during this era of assessment-driven learning. During that time, I learned three things on the topic of standardized assessments: 1) any one of them can be mastered; 2) mastery requires a specific set of test-taking skills; and 3) while some students already have those skills before test day, those skills are learnable — and therefore teachable. In retrospect, it’s on the last factor where my first Bar prep program was lacking and where Steven’s program excelled, because I was a student who badly needed to learn those skills.
With Steven’s course, I learned how MBE topics are tested and how to quickly spot bad answer choices; how to essays are graded and how to present a topic; how to manage my time during bar prep and on the test.
On test day, it felt like I had encountered almost every possible scenario and therefore knew what to do when things didn’t go as planned — like when I had my brief panic attack and lost out on a precious 5-6 minutes during the first essay, like where to allocate any extra time I had left over (yeah, it happened and it was weird), or like how to answer a question where I hadn’t a clue about the black letter on the topic.
In short, I don’t regret taking the course at all. And if I have a regret, it’s that I didn’t hire Steven sooner. — Saul Rodriguez, Esq., passed the February 2020 California Bar Examination