BARBRI

US-based legal education provider BARBRI, previously best known in the UK for its New York and California bar exam prep courses and Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme (QLTS) prep courses, launched its Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) Prep course in January 2021 and has quickly grown to become a leading online player in the market.

What sets it apart

BARBRI’s SQE offering differentiates from that of traditional market players on both price and delivery. SQE1 and SQE2 Prep courses are offered at £2,999 respectively, with SQE2 Prep costing £3,499 for non-BARBRI alumni.

Using its existing investment in technology and more than 50-years’ experience in training candidates to master multiple-choice exam questions, BARBRI’s courses are delivered mostly online, with some workshops taking place on-campus at the universities with which it has partnered.

Doing an SQE course and being told to not make any notes may seem rather counterintuitive, but this is BARBRI’s advice to students.

Its SQE Prep courses come equipped with ISAAC, an Intuitive Study Assistant and Coach. This handy tool generates a ‘Personal Study Plan’, or PSP, which updates based on time left until the exam and allows each student to customize their schedule. You can block out days off if you’ve got a holiday planned, and take weekends off if you’d like. The PSP then generates your daily schedule, outlining the number of hours of work you have to do each day, as well as the assignments to be covered. On the 20-week SQE1 Prep course, daily study hours can range between 2 and 4 hours, depending on how many days off you take per week.

Assignments on the course vary between reading material from BARBRI workbooks (which are available as hard copies or in digital format), 30-min lectures and practice questions. The lectures are interactive, with short exercises incorporated at checkpoints throughout, to ensure you’re absorbing the content and not tempted to reach for your phone. They also go in the order of the content in the study guides, so if you’re more of a visual learner, you can follow the lectures on there as well. BARBRI points out that the key thing to keep in mind about the practice questions is that they’re part of the learning process, rather than a test. So, it’s important to not get bogged down by bad scores, and not too elated at the good ones – always read the explanations for the answers, whether you’ve got them right or wrong.

The standout point of the “BARBRI method” is a study technique called ‘interleaved practice’. What this means is that rather than covering each topic in its entirety (lectures, study guide reading, practice questions) before proceeding to the next, the PSP interleaves the different topics so that students are exposed to the content in frequent intervals to aid memory retention. So, you’ll watch the lectures on a certain topic, do some practice questions on it and then revisit it a few days later when the Plan tells you to read the study guide chapters relating to it. BARBRI recommends that you follow this structure laid out for you by the PSP — so don’t give in to the temptation to whiz through a topic you like by completing all its components at once!

Another part of the course is your Learning Coach, who you can contact with both substantive legal questions as well as study technique queries. It’s quite flexible, so you can be in touch with them as much or as little as you’d like. BARBRI also hosts 2-hour online workshops at various points throughout the course, covering study techniques, test guidance and wellbeing. Since these are recorded, you can choose to attend them live if you want to ask questions, or watch them once they are uploaded and appear in your PSP.