Bar Study has exposed a weakness in my head. My ex-wife used to say, “Don’t forget to X.” I had read somewhere a few years ago that the brain doesn’t respond well to negative statements and a trick to avoid forgetting things was to avoid negative terms. For example, in the above statement, some weak minded people like myself and my friend here will not process the negative statement well and read it as, “Wa, wa, wa, forget to X”. So we forget to X.
Well, I’m finding the same problem is happening with multiple choice questions on the Bar Exam. The questions I have the hardest time with will generally give you a very long fact pattern and then ask something along the lines of, “If the court agrees that Joe Schmoe does NOT have a life estate at the lap of luxury it will be because which of the following statements is FALSE? Then the answer will be something like, “The Hutch CAN’T make this devise in his will because it violates the Rule Against Perpetuities.”
My brain can’t handle the negatives. When I review a lot of the questions I miss, a great many of them I actually know the answer to. But even in simple instances when it asks me which answers are false, my brain stares at the answers struggling, because I only want to look for answers that are true. So I click on answers that are true knowing full well that they are true because my brain refuses to accept clicking on an answer that is a false statement. So when you throw double, triple, quadruple negatives, well, trouble ensues.
Bar Tally: 138 Hours
