Regarding the Bar/Bri situation, I’m assuming that you’ve already explored (and exploited, to the extent possible) all avenues of economic hardship discounts (amazingly, they actually do provide those on a limited bases — it’s worth pursuing if you haven’t already). Now, regarding the question of actually attending the classes — it is surely a tough issue, given how you’ve indicated that money is pretty tight right now. It gets tougher when you realize that wholly secluding yourself for the entire six-weeks of preparation creates a jolt to the system to anyone but the most hardened study-veteran (i.e., the person who lived in Burns library throughout their three years of law school). If you had any soul at all during those three years, chances are that your mind is only going to be able to take so much studying. More likely than not, this means that having a modicum of access to friends and family will be essential to keeping your sanity.

So what to do? I concur with others who say that the classes are vital. They are taught by persons who know what is normally tested on the exam, and that pinpoint knowledge is vital to being able to concentrate on the things you must concentrate on. The books themselves do not give you that, and every bar exam is chiefly about allocating your time and energy to only the things you need to focus on, to the exclusion of everything else. Passing the exam will be incredibly difficult without the Bar/Bri classes. I also concur with the advice that says you should try and prod Bar/Bri to see which of the lectures are taped (unfortunately, a lot of them might not be taped, because given your indication that there are a small amount of people sitting for the Montana exam generally, the amount taking the Bar/Bri class will certainly be smaller — likely too few to justify taping the lectures). For the six multistate subjects, however, they are taped. Therefore, for at least I’d say 1/3 of the subjects you need to learn, you’ll simply have to find a way to view the tapes. If Montana Bar/Bri is anything like Pennsylvania Bar/Bri, you’ll be able to check the tapes out and take them home with you to watch and study from (of course, driving them back and forth is going to be a bitch as well).

Regarding taking PMBR, I took the PMBR 3-day cram session about a week before administration of the exams. Given that I did pretty well on my exams, I’m apt to say that if you have the means, you should take both courses. Stylistically, the PMBR questions more closely resembled the questions that I saw on the Multistate exam. Moreover, as already mentioned, PMBR lets you have three CDs in the multistate subjects of your choice, that you can most certainly use (in concert with the Bar/Bri books and lectures) to help create outline for the Montana essay portions.

If you want to talk or need more advice, just email me.

Audacity: I’m not really convinced about PMBR – I’ve heard mixed reviews. A friend just told me that the PMBR questions are real but rejected MBE questions, so they’re generally harder or more random than what you’ll actually encounter. The BarBri MBE review questions are made up, so they’re easier but more like what you’ll actually see on the test. Was that your experience? I have this feeling that I’ll be doing well to master all the multiple choice practice BarBri provides…

j9: Sorry, I forgot to mention this before, but if you’re not using the latest (at least 2.0) version of Safari this site looks awful and totally unreadable. If you haven’t upgraded to Mac OS 10.4 and the latest version of Safari, try Firefox or just subscribe to the RSS in bloglines or NewsFire. It looks much better that way!

j9