I graduated in 2010, studied and took the California bar (passed my first time). I used two bar review courses simultaneously (AdaptiBar was not one of them, but looking back, I would have definitely added it). Overall, I took over 90+ essays, and 1,700 - 1,800 Multiple Choice questions in prepping for the California Bar. I spend my time now advising law firms, and Fortune 1,000 companies using their own data to draw insights, and offer ways to improve their businesses. AdaptiBar has taken the same approach that I use in work and applied it to studying for the bar. Overall, I found their program very helpful because it gave me the ability to immediately start assessing not just a weak subject, but a weak subtopic.
Quick disclaimer: As part of this review, I did reach out to AdaptiBar and asked if it would be alright for me to have access to the program, in exchange for me reviewing their product, and sharing it with everyone on the website. While doing my research, I also requested a discount that I could share with everyone. If you want to receive $30 off your order, you can click the link here to sign up (note I do receive a commission, but found the AdaptiBar program extremely useful, and do recommend it).
Let’s get one question out of the way. Is AdaptiBar worth your time? The answer is: Yes! If you are self-studying, or struggling on multiple-choice questions and need a way to assess your weak spots and improve, then AdaptiBar offers a great program that provides you with fully licensed questions from the same people that administer the MBE.
About the Program
AdaptiBar was started in 2003, by a law student who was looking to fill the gap in online bar study programs. The course is designed for anyone taking the multiple-choice exam, but can really help those who fall into two groups of people:
- Those who have decided to study for the bar on their own; and
- Those who might have purchased a formal program, but need additional help on the multiple-choice portion of the exam.
The formal AdaptiBar course offers everything one could need, or use to prepare for the multiple-choice section of the exam and the base course includes:
- 1,730 simulated questions (1,530 of which are licensed from the NCBEX)
- 4 full OPE exams (2006, 2009, 2011, 2013) - Included in the 1,730
- Dynamic learning and performance to diagnose your weak spots, while making sure to maintain your strong suits.
- An iPhone app that provides pretty much everything that you can access through the website for on-the-go.
How to Use AdaptiBar To Maximize Your Results:
If you sign up for the free trial there is an initial orientation stage, to get situated. After that, AdaptiBar has a recommended program, that is outlined in their handbook.
They recommend taking a set of questions and using their powerful benchmarking and analytical tool to find your weaknesses.
- Step 1: Outline Studying
Read each one of your outlines prior to taking the course so you understand the content.
- Step 2: Conduct an Initial Assessment Using their Platform
The initial assessment comes down to completing approximately 350 questions (50 in each subject). This will give you a solid base on which to see where you need to improve. It also starts giving the AdaptiBar platform, the ability to measure your performance.
- Step 3: Assess Your Weaknesses
Assessing your weakness is fairly simple. You can use the AdaptiBar program’s benchmarking area (outlined in detail below) to identify weak areas for improvement.
- Step 4: Fix Your Weak Spots
Under step 4, you are honing the topics that you are the weakest in, taking extra multiple-choice questions to better position yourself. You do this by taking 1 subtopic each day, and reviewing your outline, and taking more multiple choice questions.
- Step 5: Reassess Your Weak Spots
After having completed an additional 350 questions, it’s time to start the process over again. The goal here is to continue on, eliminating weak areas as you complete the course.
Note, as you go through the Adaptibar process, they will message you to let you know when it is time to move on to a new topic or to reassess your weaknesses.
AdaptiBar Features
While the full program is very robust, there are three specific features that I want to highlight that I found extremely helpful during my review of the program.
- AdaptiBar’s adaptive technology and benchmarking abilities
- Practice Questions
- Practice Exams
I’ll go into detail about each of the three below.
Feature 1: Adaptibar Adaptive Technology & Benchmarking
The core aspect of AdaptiBar is their adaptive technology. Here is how it works, you begin answering questions on a variety of topics, and benchmark yourself. AdaptiBar’s technology keeps track of your answers, analyzing how well you are doing on certain subjects and subtopics. As you are completing practice questions, AdaptiBar will, for lack of a better term, adapt to your needs, and provide you with more questions in your weak areas until you start to improve.
This means that each person who subscribes to AdaptiBar will have a unique study path. You can always pick and choose which topics/subtopics you want to be tested on, but, if you really want to maximize the program, let the technology adapt to your needs.
AdaptiBar is also well known for their powerful, proprietary benchmarking tool. Imagine being able to take a question, see all aspects of how you performed on it, including how long it took you, what your answer was, whether it was right or wrong and why. Now add onto that, the ability to see how others performed, and cut that information by topic and sub-topic. You then start to get a sense of how powerful the AdaptiBar platform is.
The process for maximizing benchmarking is fairly straightforward, you answer questions through either Practice Questions, or Practice Exams while AdaptiBar works in the background to assess your weak areas. The more questions that you take, the better the program becomes. At any time you can go into the Performance menu to see your current performance. It measures your performance against other groups of individuals. Overall, the program was extremely helpful, and if I was to take the exam again in another state, I would incorporate AdaptiBar into my own study schedule.
Benchmarking and Reports
AdaptiBar offers a plethora of benchmarking and analytical tools as part of the program, which is designed to help you pinpoint your weak areas on the MBE. They offer Subject Performance, Subject Analysis, Timing Performance, Timing Analysis, Past Questions, Exam Reports, Past Performance Tables, and Question Progress to see how many questions you’ve answered overall in the program. I’m going to focus on two areas for this review:
Subject Performance & Subject Analysis:
The subject performance section lets you see how well you perform across the 8 subjects on the Multistate bar exam. Within each subject, AdaptiBar has broken them down into smaller subtopics (30 in total). As you continue to answer more and more questions you can measure your performance on an individual level, against the state average, or on a national level. What is great is that you can also export a pdf of your current performance across all topics and subtopics. This feature is extremely important as it is part of the recommended AdaptiBar program where you examine your weaknesses in each subtopic. You can see a sample picture of the benchmarking area below.
