As someone who’s studying for the most intense, demanding, and butt-kicking exam of their life, nothing less than the absolute BEST study tools and bar prep resources will do. 

That’s why you’re reading this. Because you’ve asked yourself: “What’s up with Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards? How were they made? Are they legit? Do they cover the content taught by the bar prep course I’m taking? Will they help me pass the bar exam?”

Your questions are what inspired us to write this article. It’s taken years of hard work and the ongoing input of literally hundreds of top legal educators, law grads, and bar prep tutors to create these flashcards. And we want to be transparent in our processes—from conception, creation, and vetting to ongoing, crowdsourced optimization—so that you can see for yourself that they really are the best supplementary study tool for your bar prep.

Let’s begin.

How Brainscape’s MBE flashcards are made

It all began with a team of bar exam instructors, who created a collection of flashcards based on their expertise and understanding of the high-yield concepts students need to know in order to answer the more complex questions posed by the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE).

These instructors then scoured textbooks, past exams, and materials by top bar prep courses like BarBri, Themis, Critical Pass, BarMax, Kaplan to ensure that our MBE flashcards weren't missing any of the important concepts that others were covering.

All of this was accomplished with the goal of giving law students a way to systematically learn and permanently ingrain the crushing volume of law content they need to pass the bar exam and embark upon their careers in law.

[To learn about how Brainscape streamlines and optimizes your study experience, check out 'How to study in law school using Brainscape' or watch this video...]

Release to thousands of law students for testing and feedback

We then released our initial collection of MBE flashcards to thousands of law students (our enthusiastic “guinea pigs”), who used them for their own studies, providing invaluable feedback in the process.

In addition to basic corrections (like spelling) and improving clarification, these students brought to our attention any additional high-yield concepts that consistently appeared throughout their own prep materials, but were not covered in the core Brainscape flashcards.

These crowdsourced edit suggestions were—and still are—reviewed by our content advisory team composed of educators and top students from Dartmouth, UCLA, Boston College, Columbia, SmartBar, and other leading institutions. Should a suggestion meet the approval of multiple advisors, the flashcard in question is corrected or made from scratch to cover that new concept. 

In doing so, Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards are constantly undergoing micro-improvements to make them as relevant, efficient, and accurate as possible.

(We also continue to collect thorough ongoing feedback from our users, and you can provide yours too in our feedback survey.)

Covering the highest-yield concepts in BarBri, Themis, Kaplan, Adaptibar, BarMax, Critical Pass, & others

At first, we relentlessly collected, considered, and implemented edit suggestions and new content. Eventually, however, these suggestions slowed to a crawl, at which point we realized that our MBE flashcards must finally be hitting all of the highest-yield content taught by top bar prep courses like BarBri, Themis, Kaplan, Adaptibar, BarMax, Critical Pass, Quimbee, and others.

This became and remains a key benefit of Brainscape’s MBE flashcards: that they are an effective supplementary study tool to a wide range of popular bar prep courses. So no matter which provider you’re using—Kaplan bar prep, Critical Pass flashcards, BarMax, and many others—these bar exam flashcards will support your learning.

Today, Brainscape’s bar prep flashcards receive very few new edit suggestions and even fewer that meet the rigorous standards we have set for our existing collection. (In fact, most are now deemed invalid.) Even so, we continue to analyze every edit suggestion that comes in to ensure that these flashcards reflect the most up-to-date content taught in the top bar prep resources and materials.

Optimized for fast, efficient learning

So far, we’ve focused on how we created and vetted the content in Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards, giving you an overview of the expertise that was involved and the community of high-level learners that helped to get—and keep—this content up-to-date.

But equally important is how we optimized this content for learning, which we did in two ways:

• Content format: We boiled down books of information into neatly organized question-and-answer pairs. We then wrote these in a way that is as easy to digest as possible, using bolded and/or italicized text, bullet points, short answers, and footnotes to ensure that you’re learning everything you need to, without any unnecessary detail.
• Content delivery: These flashcards are then delivered via a continuously fine-tuned spaced repetition algorithm that blends several cognitive learning tactics to help you ingrain and retain the information as efficiently as humanly possible. 

Essentially, we shaved every second we could off of the cognitive load for each flashcard, using all of these tactics to ensure the most immediate visual and conceptual salience possible!

[For more excellent advice on learning as fast and painlessly as possible—without burning out—read our free bar exam study guide: ‘How to study for the Bar Exam more efficiently’.]

Are Brainscape’s MBE flashcards proven to improve bar exam scores?

Look, we could try to cherry-pick data and woo you with marketing rhetoric like many of the other bar prep courses do. (“Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards will improve your bar exam score by 37 points!”)  But that's BS. No publisher or course provider could know that stat perfectly.

We won't blow smoke up your behind just to get your money. And, realistically, we’re not gonna do a perfect double-blind longitudinal study with a control group of students who don’t use Brainscape but study for the exact same number of hours with other tools, and then invade their privacy by asking for bar exam scores later.

Instead, we’re going to refer you to what our users universally say. Check out reviews, do a little sleuthing on Reddit, or ask your classmates (many of whom will be using Brainscape). Brainscape will dramatically improve your study efficiency and your preparedness for the bar exam.

You’ll know this when you start using our MBE flashcards. And it’ll become increasingly apparent the more that you use them. And if you’re still a little skeptical, read about the decades of cognitive science research that proves all aspects of the Brainscape method.

So, are Brainscape’s MBE flashcards legit?

YES. And here’s a reminder of what you get:

• 2,620+ Flashcards that cover the highest-yield law concepts in every MBE subject, with all the fluff left out.
• Peace of mind as we’ve covered the most important concepts taught by the top bar exam courses, such as BarBri, Themis, Kaplan, Adaptibar, BarMax, and Critical Pass.
• A hyper-efficient system for learning and remembering all of the major subject areas on the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE): Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts.
• A Rapid Fire Deck to quickly test you on the fundamentals of the black letter law for each subject. 
• Over 400 flashcards enabled with online resources for deep-dive learning.
• Ongoing feedback, statistics, and visualization tools to help you track your progress.
• A carefully tailored curriculum that builds on previous concepts and guides you from definition to legal analysis.
• In-sync studying across Brainscape’s website and all your iOS and Android devices.

We hope you’re thoroughly convinced that Brainscape’s MBE flashcards are the best supplementary study tool to help you rise to the challenge of the bar exam!

Additional (free) resources for law grads studying for the bar exam

Brainscape’s “Hands-free” bar prep podcast: You can listen to this valuable series of bar prep episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts (wherever you listen to podcasts), or listen/watch as a series of videos on our Law YouTube Channel.

Brainscape’s Law YouTube channel: A library of video content and interviews with bar prep and legal experts on how to excel in law school, at the bar exam, and in your law career.

Brainscape’s Law Academy: A library of written law school and bar prep study guides that’ll equip you with the tools, advice, and study hacks you need to learn as efficiently as humanly possible, without burning out.