BARBRI Extended U.S. Prep FAQs

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We know you might have a few questions. Read on for BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course FAQs.

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Please note that these FAQs are specific to the BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course, and may not be applicable to the traditional BARBRI Bar Review course.

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If you no longer have access to the email address that was used to create your account or you need additional assistance, please contact BARBRI Customer Service at service@barbri.com or 888-322-7274 (U.S.).

To be eligible for the New York Bar Exam, foreign applicants must have completed a three-year or four-year full-time, on-campus, qualifying common law degree. For example, an English/Irish law degree is accepted by the New York Board of Law Examiners. The curriculum needs to be on campus and amount to 166 European Credit Transfer System credits.

If a foreign applicant has completed a civil law degree, then they will need to have completed one-year, full-time LL.M. in the United States at an ABA-accredited law school. The LL.M. does need to fulfill certain classes, subjects and credits to be eligible for the bar exam.

However, law degrees from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not accepted. These applicants will also need to complete the one-year LL.M. in the United States to cure the deficiency to be eligible for the New York Bar Exam.

Visit this page to learn more about U.S. bar exam foreign eligibility and requirements for UBE jurisdictions other than New York.

Candidates who have completed a two-year accelerated LL.B. in the UK, or a dual-modular degree (Law with Politics, Law with French, for example) may have difficulties securing eligibility. This is because with accelerated degrees, candidates must have completed the degree in three years.

We have found that those applicants who have completed a postgraduate common law qualification (such as a UK LL.M., LPC/BPTC), may then file a persuasive eligibility application to be eligible for the New York Bar Exam. Dual-modular degrees are difficult because the law modules must meet 166 European Credit Transfer System credits. Again, those applicants whom have completed a postgraduate common law qualification, such as a UK LL.M. or LPC/BPTC, may be eligible for the New York Bar Exam.

Unfortunately, those candidates are not eligible for the New York Bar Exam. The New York Board of Law Examiners has a ruling whereby applicants who have completed the GDL and the LPC or the BPTC must first qualify as solicitors or barristers by way of a training contract or pupillage. The applicant must then complete a one-year LL.M. in the United States at an accredited law school to be eligible for the New York Bar Exam.

Generally, any qualified lawyer in good standing anywhere in the world is eligible to sit the California Bar Exam. So long as the attorney can produce a certificate of good standing and a home jurisdiction practice certificate, the California Bar Exam is available. In addition, an international law student may become eligible for the California Bar by completing a one-year LL.M. at a law school approved by the American Bar Association (ABA) or accredited by the state of California. In practice, this means completing an LL.M. in the United States. Equally, an online LL.M. from a U.S. law school is also eligible for the California Bar Exam.

To qualify as a New York attorney, you need to:

Visit this page to learn more about U.S. bar admissions for UBE jurisdictions other than New York.

To qualify as a California attorney, you need to:

There is no particular visa required to travel to the United States to sit for a U.S. bar exam. Traveling on a normal tourist visa is sufficient.

Yes, is the short answer; however, the reality is United States immigration law is tough. For those who wish to relocate to New York and practice after New York qualification (and for California after California qualification), a firm or employer is required to sponsor their work visa.

Without completing a law degree from an accredited law school in the U.S., becoming qualified in most state jurisdictions is not available, even while being qualified in New York or California.

The New York Bar Exam has adopted the Uniform Bar Exam, which many states have adopted to date. The UBE is a standardized bar exam created by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE). It is designed to test knowledge and skills that every lawyer should have before becoming licensed to practice law.

The Uniform Bar Examination provides a standardized bar exam, and examinees who take the UBE earn a portable score that can be transferred to seek admission in other UBE jurisdictions. However, foreign applicants without a U.S. law school education (without a J.D. gained over three years of U.S. law school) cannot waive into another UBE state and qualify there.

California is a state-specific bar exam which means that once you qualify in California, you can only practice as an attorney in California.

Bar exam formats vary by state. For more information about U.S. bar exam formats, please visit this page.

Preparing for a February bar exam?

  • 6-month course starts in September with access to Foundations in U.S. Law in July
  • 10-month course starts in April with access to Foundations in U.S. Law in February

Preparing for a July bar exam?

  • 6-month course starts in February with access to Foundations in U.S. Law in December
  • 10-month course starts in September with access to Foundations in U.S. Law in July

Students should expect to spend on average between 20-25 hours per week for the 6-month course or 10-15 hours per week for the 10-month course studying. Each week, you may study the specific days, hours per day, and time of day that work best for your schedule.

You will see the full course schedule once your Personal Study Plan becomes available just before your course starts. You will have the option to customize your course calendar to meet your needs. The BARBRI course is on-demand, so your personal online schedule will adjust based on how much work you complete.

You can complete 100% of your BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course online anywhere in the world as long as you have a strong, stable internet connection.

You can defer your Extended U.S. Bar Prep course studies once, to a later course, provided you do so before the original exam you intended to sit. The deferral fee is $399 and is payable to confirm the deferral. You can only defer on your original course.

For help, please email service@barbri.com or call +1-888-322-7274.

Absolutely! We highly recommend it.

Eight weeks prior to your official BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course start date, you can gain access to "The Foundations in U.S. Law", which is a 90-hour course providing the basic building blocks in the areas of U.S. Law you will be studying in the main course. This is particularly beneficial to students who have not completed their law education in the U.S. You must have paid part or all of your fees before you can gain access to the Foundations course.

The BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course is very flexible, and allows you to study when and where you study best over the 6- or 10-month duration during which the course is assigning work. Whether you are an early bird or a night owl, BARBRI is ready to go when you are.

Your BARBRI Personal Study Plan (PSP) adjusts to you as you work. Your PSP is driven by an engine called ISAAC, your Intuitive Study Assistant And Coach, that knows what is most likely to be tested on the exam (what's most important) and it gets to know you. If you spend less time studying one day, ISAAC adjusts your PSP and reassigns recommended assignments to ensure you are always focused on the most impactful assignments to get you the most points on your bar exam.

While your study time, days and location are extremely flexible, studying for the bar exam requires time and commitment. You should plan on spending the recommended hours per week over 6-10 months studying for the bar exam. It can be difficult to catch up should you fall too far behind.

If you have a BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep account, you can sign in to your account and review the Orders Page to see your current balance and payment options. Once signed in, you can also review your Payments Page to view your payment history.
 
 

BARBRI offers students the opportunity to pay their fees in full or via a payment plan depending on your course length. You can find details here.

Your payment plan will be interest-free when you pay with a debit or credit card. It is not a loan, so no credit check is required.

BARBRI accepts American Express, MasterCard, Discover and VISA.

We also accept payments in your own currency through our payment partner transfermate.

BARBRI has a direct billing relationship with over 1,000 law firms. You can specify the employer that you'd like us to invoice during enrollment. 

Once you have requested that BARBRI directly bill a law firm for your bar review course, the selected firm will receive an invoice for your balance due. 

Year after year, BARBRI supports thousands of students who seek to change the world. Last year alone, BARBRI awarded over $4.5M in scholarships to public interest students and other world-changers.

To apply for a BARBRI Public Interest Scholarship, while they are available, submit your application. If selected, you will receive a discount on your BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course tuition.

Yes, we will send your books to the address you include on your BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep enrollment form. There are no additional fees for international shipping.

When enrolled in the BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course, BARBRI books are shipped within the U.S. by UPS ground service or couriered via FedEx International Priority outside of the U.S. (included in the course price). They are typically not taxed at customs.

For the February bar exam?

  • 6-month course books are available in September
  • 10-month course books are available in April

Preparing for a July bar exam?

  • 6-month course books are available in February
  • 10-month course books are available in September

If you are based in the U.S., BARBRI course materials will be sent via UPS Ground. International shipments will be sent via FedEx Priority. Course payment is required prior to shipping books.

Please email service@barbri.com or call +1-888-322-7274 if you have questions or need help with ordering or shipping materials.

The specific materials you will receive vary state-by-state. When you receive your materials, carefully compare the contents to the checklist.

When enrolling in Extended U.S. Bar Prep, you are not required to pay a refundable book deposit and are not required to return your books.

For Extended U.S. Bar Prep students, your books and shipping are included in your fees.

We know some students like to watch shorter segments and take regular breaks. Others get “in the zone” and prefer to stay focused. That’s why we broke down each BARBRI lecture into segmented components. Lecture length will vary with some segments as short as a few minutes, or you can watch a lecture in its entirety, typically three to four hours. You can work one or a few sections and take a break, or you can continue through to the end. Either way, you’ll stay focused throughout each segment by actively participating in quizzes and other learning activities.

Yes, BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep is designed to prepare students to pass the bar in all UBE jurisdictions as well as California.

The short answer is that, within your BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course, we will grade as many essays as you want to submit. However, your Personal Study Plan provides a Directed Essay Grading approach. To understand that, let's first talk about the strategy of essay writing for the bar exam.

During bar study, your goal is to learn to write the best bar exam essays possible, as quickly as possible. And writing essays for the bar exam is very different than writing essays for law school.

As we've worked with students, we've seen that submitting practice essay after essay with no initial guidance and delayed feedback reinforces bad habits and wastes time. For this reason, a purely "unlimited" essay grading system can actually stunt your progress.

We don't want that for our students, so BARBRI has a better answer with proven results: Directed Essay Grading.

It starts with Essay Architect, our exclusive online instruction platform that takes you through a series of steps to learn to critically read bar exam questions, enhance the speed of your essay writing and construct strong, winning answers. Essay Architect provides immediate feedback to build your essay writing skills quickly.

Then, we assign a carefully selected series of past bar exam essays and performance tests for grading and feedback from trained bar exam writing experts. You'll also receive many more essays for practice and self-grading.

If after taking advantage of those assignments you want additional essays graded, we're happy to grade more.

You'll have access to over 2,500 MBE questions throughout your BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course. However, we don't believe that this is quite the right question - or at least not the entire question - to be asking.

As with many things, it's not just the quantity, it's the quality and the methodology that matters. This is such an important topic, that we have an entire blog dedicated to this topic that you can read here.

When it comes to real released MBE questions, BARBRI has released questions - and we assign select questions that have been vetted to ensure they represent areas most likely to be tested. As a general rule, we don't recommend focusing too much on released MBE questions.

Questions that have been released by the examiners will not appear in any future MBE because the scoring data for those questions would not be reliable. And, because only about 80 questions per subject have been released in the past 10 years, released questions don't provide a good representation of the topics that are most likely to actually appear on the exam. Focusing primarily on real released MBE questions is another way some bar preppers misuse precious, limited study time.

The vast majority of BARBRI's questions have been developed by BARBRI subject matter experts to test on the most important, most frequently tested topic areas - the same way the bar examiners do. These questions have been drafted after careful review of actual MBE questions and have been approved by professors who are experts in those subjects.

We recommend that you complete the course on a computer or a laptop. Google Chrome is our suggested internet browser. If you are using a Mac, please download Google Chrome or Safari for the best experience. If you are using a PC, please download Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox for the best experience.

Click here for other technical requirements and troubleshooting tips.

You may also download the BARBRI Study Plan App to watch lectures (streaming or swipe to download) and work practice questions on iOS and Android.

Yes, you are able to submit substantive question during your course through your Personal Study Plan.

Questions are answered by BARBRI attorneys and, in most instances, within 48 hours via email or phone.

Your BARBRI Mentor will not be the one answering your substantive law questions, as their expertise is advising you on study tips, learning and exam techniques, and motivation.

If you take a BARBRI Extended U.S. Bar Prep course for the first time for a particular state and you do not pass that state's bar exam, you may retake the same course online once for the same state the next time the course is offered without paying additional tuition.

To use your BARBRI Guarantee please contact service@barbri.com and we will direct you to the correct link for enrollment.

Your Guarantee course is available for a course starting within one year from your original exam date and does not include any upgrades, including supplemental workshops or a second set of books.

If you wish to purchase a new set of books for your Guarantee course, you can do this for $295 including shipping.

Click here for information about current pricing and promotions, and to enroll.

Access to the course content will conclude the Monday after the bar exam is administered.

For all BARBRI courses and tuition types, you may cancel your enrollment within 14 days of enrolling. You will be refunded all fees minus a $295 administration fee. The fees must be returned to the card you made payment on.

If your books have already been shipped, you will be required to return them at your own cost to your nearest BARBRI office before the refund can be processed.

Find the BARBRI bar prep course that's built for you

Extended Bar Prep

Part-time course | 6- or 10-month 

Study for a UBE state, including New York or California
Best for:

Candidates without a J.D. from a U.S. law school looking for the most comprehensive bar prep or students who want more study time & flexibility

Traditional Bar Review

Full-time course | 8-10 week

Study for any U.S. state exam, including the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE)
Best for:

Candidates with a J.D. from a U.S. law school looking for the quickest, most efficient & effective course to pass any U.S. state bar exam

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