In the March 2015 Testing Column of the NCBE Bar Examiner, the Director of NCBE Test Operations stated: “To prepare graders, NCBE provides detailed grading materials, which are subjected to review by outside content experts, editing by drafting committees, and proofing and cite-checking by NCBE lawyer-editors. … the grading materials are included in MEE and MPT study aids, so prospective examinees can become familiar with the questions and what graders are looking for in examinee answers.” Thus, by reviewing the NCBE grading materials, you are looking at what the graders are also looking at.

The MEE grading materials from 1995 to present are available through a UBE Essays subscription (when new exams are released, they are added). However, offering past MEE questions and answers is not something that is unique – many bar reviews provide these questions and the older MEE questions can also be downloaded for free from NCBE’s website. What is unique about a UBE Essays Subscription package is that I take MEE materials and re-organize them into more useful/efficient study tools. This is helpful to examinees who want to study more efficiently (e.g. they are limited in time or they only plan limited MEE study because they intend to focus on the MBE). For example, I put all 350+ released MEE questions and answers into a single MEE Essay Compilation sorted by subject to enable easier studying, testing, review, comparison, and searching. There are also 34 hours of MP3 audio files covering the last 200+ MEE questions and answers (from July 2007 to present) in order to create different memory impressions. The individual PDFs of the MEE exams (which are available for purchase on NCBE’s website) are also available for download (50 exams), although I recommend the MEE Essay Compilation document because it is much more efficient to use.

For example, a F17 subscriber who passed with an MBE score of 136 and a total UBE score of 290 (meaning MEE/MPT of 154) told me she relied heavily on the full essays in the Released Answer Compilation. The examinee explained: “seeing the application of the law in the questions was far more helpful than reviewing the black letter law on its own … the sheer repetition of reviewing the law applied to the facts with analysis helped me figure out how to structure essays, the detail needed in analysis, and what the right answers were. I went through so many essays…..I think the only downside was feeling overwhelmed by so much material (which isn’t really a downside) … The MEE Issue Spotting outline was helpful for identifying issues and did not take a significant amount of time, allowing me to study simultaneusly for the MBE.”