Bar class has been plugging along. Not fun, but not awful. My routine is to go to school in the morning, do the assignments and review my notes, eat lunch, go to the Barbri lecture in the afternoon, come back and do the homework. It is unexciting, but necessary. But today, I had two back to back experiences that are really shaking my faith in Barbri.
This morning I was working on my first essay question of the entire course. I hadn't seen the form of the questions or the form of the model answers. The model answers, we are told, are truly model because they are written by attorneys with unlimited time and resources, whereas we are time pressured and have only our memories. The essay question was about corporations, a topic I took in law school and reviewed last week in Barbri's class. I wrote out my answer and identified three main issues: duty of loyalty, duty of care, and requirements for a derivative suit (I promise it doesn't matter what those mean right now). Then I flipped to the model answer, and it had only two issues: duty of loyalty and the derivative suit. What happened to the duty of care issue? I flipped back and looked at the question again, and I really thought I saw a care issue. Either I'm crazy and was spotting an issue that didn't exist, or Barbri's model answer - their model answer - was missing a huge part. I asked a friend or two whether they thought there should be a care issue. They both agreed with me, as did a girl in my lecture who also had done the problem. So are these model answers good answers or aren't they? Later in the day, I actually called Barbri to ask what was going on. They told me to call back tomorrow for some reason or another (probably because it was the end of the workday and they didn't want to deal with me - legit given how much their course costs?).
My second problem with Barbri is somehow more disturbing. Today's lecture was the second day of Real Property. I took the class in school, I've been reading, reviewing, and generally doing my work. So I was shocked when the lecturer missed one of the elements of adverse possession. There are five requirements, and she only listed four of them, excluding the requirement that possession be exclusive. This element was a question that came up on Barbri's own AMP software and on a practice question, so I was shocked that she could just leave it off. And it wasn't by mistake - the handout that we got excluded the element from the otherwise complete list. I couldn't believe it; I looked it up in Barbri's own provided materials just to make sure I was correct. And sure enough, she just blew it. (Then again, she also claimed her father invented penne alla vodka, so I don't know why I'm surprised.) While I'm happy that I caught the mistake, it is disturbing. I took property in law school and have a decent familiarity with it - what about the classes I didn't take? What about secured transactions, family law, and all the others? Are they omitting important details there too? It's just very unsettling, and I don't really know what to do about it. I can't exactly ask the lecturer what the deal was - she's just a video, recorded live last week in Boston. Ummmm, this seems like the beginning of something ominous. If I can't trust the lecturers, and I can't trust the model answers, who can I trust? I am the Jason Bourne of Barbri.
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