Some things I've picked up from watching a few hundred bar essays get scored
I passed the February bar and built an essay practice platform with a friend of mine who's an engineer. We've had students write, and have tweaked the platform as it’s graded a few hundred practice essays, and I wanted to share some of the patterns that will easily increase a writing score.
When it comes to the essays specifically, what I found in the research was that bar graders only spend about 30 seconds to a minute and a half looking at your essay. Sometimes less. Once that clicked for me it changed how I approached writing. The real trick is making sure you organize your essays with proper headers and very clear IRAC. Your essay needs to be scannable (aka pass the “eye test”). And the real meat of your essay should be making the analysis section slightly longer than the other parts of the IRAC structure.
When it comes to rule statements, students get pressured to write the exact rules from memory. But when you're under pressure from the exam, there are so many rules tested that it's very unlikely you'll remember them all. Part of the trick is reverse engineering the rules from the facts. When you don't know a rule, you don't stress about it. You write a rule statement that sounds mostly right, as long as you spot the right issues that trigger those rules. You're ahead of the person who spotted the issue but froze because they couldn't remember the exact language.
For the analysis part, I used a kind of formula (which I believe Goat mentions in one of his posts):
X element was satisfied because of Y fact. X element was satisfied because of Z fact.
You could word that differently:
Due to Y fact, Z element was satisfied.
The point is that using those formulas forces you to tie in specific facts to specific elements. Even if they aren't completely legally accurate, to the eyes of a bar grader who is speed reading, you look like someone who can write an essay that passes for legal analysis.
For conclusions, instead of writing a basic conclusion like "Therefore, diversity jurisdiction was satisfied," it's better to append the conclusion with something. Anything. Like:
"Diversity jurisdiction was satisfied because Joe was a citizen of State Y and Sally was a citizen of State B, and the amount in controversy was $80,000."
That sort of conclusion looks better as a last sentence. You're adding analysis to the conclusion.
The more analysis you show, even if it isn't 100% accurate, the better and more polished your essay will look. You effectively want your analysis section to look longer than the other sections of IRAC.
This is what shaped how we built SHEP (shepbarprep.com). We designed the scoring around what a grader actually sees when they're speed-reading 200 essays: issue spotting, rule accuracy, fact application, and organization. You can try a free essay if you're curious. But even without the tool, if you focus on making your analysis longer and tying every element to a specific fact, that alone will help.
Happy to answer questions about what we've seen.