Done!

The Guam Bar is finished! 

As I type, I think there are still people in the US taking their bar exams - in Washington and maybe some other states, they'll still be taking it tomorrow, too. 

Not here! Guam, where America's Day Begins, is also where America's Bar Exam ends. Thank goodness! 

So, how was it? It is hard to say. These tests are not designed to let you know if you passed or not based on how you feel when you leave the exam. That being said, I felt alright when I left. It was about what I expected it to be - more or less. 

The exam was in four parts, over the course of two days. The first part was a three-hour, six-question essay test. There were eleven possible subjects they might have covered - eleven subjects to study and memorize - but they only tested on five or six: Uniform Commercial Code sales and negotiable instruments, Partnership, Corporations, First Amendment, Criminal law (not procedure), Wills... I think that is all. That test was challenging because of the time constraint: hand-written essays (they don't have the option on Guam to use a computer!) to be completed in a half an hour each. It doesn't sound so bad, but when you actually do it for three hours straight, you begin to feel like the exam is a test of endurance as much as a test of knowledge!

The second section was what is known as the Multistate Practical Test, which consists of a mock legal assignment of the type a new associate might get at a law firm. Ours was pretty bad, and the part of the exam on which I felt the worst. It included some factual memos, some statutes and some cases, and the assignment was to draft the argument section of a motion - a persuasive (versus objective) writing assignment. The materials didn't really directly support the position we were supposed to take, however - but maybe I was just over-analyzing and over-thinking it. Tough to say. It's over now!

The third section was a Guam-specific essay question; just a half hour and one question. They'd given us a list of statutes and cases to study, and then threw a curve ball by asking something related to the one case that didn't have anything to do with the rest of the list. I was absolutely prepared for a question on judicial instructions following a guilty plea... but that is not what they asked! 

That was it for the first day; the second day was six hours (two hundred questions) of multiple-choice. Not much to say about that: they make the questions incredibly tricky, and doing two hundred of them gets incredibly tedious. It doesn't seem possible for something to be both difficult and boring, but the bar examiners manage to achieve it! I finished about an hour early in both three-hour sessions, and spent the last hour of each second-guessing my answers. 

The results will be posted in "six to eight weeks" ... there were only eight people taking the exam, so they can take a full week to grade each exam if they choose. 

How did I do? I really can't tell. In 2006, nobody who took the Guam bar passed it - it is a tough test, and they seem to set pretty high standards. I guess I feel cautiously optimistic - I didn't feel like I could have done anything else to study, so if I don't pass, I think it will be due to bad luck rather than bad preparation. 

Well, let's hope that I had good luck rather than bad...