Where do Brainscape's certified MBE flashcards come from? (And are they legit?)
Discover the intricate creation process, sources, and players behind Brainscape’s expert-made, vetted, and continuously whetted MBE bar exam flashcards.
As someone who’s studying for the most intense, demanding, and butt-kicking exam of their life, nothing less than the absolute BEST study tools and bar prep resources will do.
That’s why you’re reading this. Because you’ve asked yourself: “What’s up with Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards? How were they made? Are they legit? Do they cover the content taught by the bar prep course I’m taking? Will they help me pass the bar exam?”
Your questions are what inspired us to write this article. It’s taken years of hard work and the ongoing input of literally hundreds of top legal educators, law grads, and bar prep tutors to create these flashcards. And we want to be transparent in our processes—from conception, creation, and vetting to ongoing, crowdsourced optimization—so that you can see for yourself that they really are the best supplementary study tool for your bar prep.
Let’s begin.
How Brainscape’s MBE flashcards are made
Brainscape’s MBE Prep consists of thousands of adaptive, digital flashcards covering the highest-yield law concepts you need to know to answer the more complex questions posed by the bar exam. These flashcards are neatly organized into 8 collections focusing on major subject areas such as Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contract Law, and more.
It all began with a team of bar exam instructors, who created a collection of flashcards based on their expertise and understanding of the high-yield concepts students need to know in order to answer the more complex questions posed by the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE).
These instructors then scoured textbooks, past exams, and materials by top bar prep courses like BarBri, Themis, Critical Pass, BarMax, Kaplan to ensure that our MBE flashcards weren't missing any of the important concepts that others were covering.
All of this was accomplished with the goal of giving law students a way to systematically learn and permanently ingrain the crushing volume of law content they need to pass the bar exam and embark upon their careers in law.
Release to thousands of law students for testing and feedback
We then released our initial collection of MBE flashcards to thousands of law students (our enthusiastic “guinea pigs”), who used them for their own studies, providing invaluable feedback in the process.
Making edit suggestions to other people’s flashcards in Brainscape
In addition to basic corrections (like spelling) and improving clarification, these students brought to our attention any additional high-yield concepts that consistently appeared throughout their own prep materials, but were not covered in the core Brainscape flashcards.
These crowdsourced edit suggestions were—and still are—reviewed by our content advisory team composed of educators and top students from Dartmouth, UCLA, Boston College, Columbia, SmartBar, and other leading institutions. Should a suggestion meet the approval of multiple advisors, the flashcard in question is corrected or made from scratch to cover that new concept.
In doing so, Brainscape’s certified MBE flashcards are constantly undergoing micro-improvements to make them as relevant, efficient, and accurate as possible.
(We also continue to collect thorough ongoing feedback from our users, and you can provide yours too in our feedback survey.)
Covering the highest-yield concepts in BarBri, Themis, Kaplan, Adaptibar, BarMax, Critical Pass, & others
Brainscape’s web and mobile app breaks knowledge down into logical bite-sized question-and-answer pairs, which compel users to engage active recall and metacognition to learn, while the spaced repetition of flashcards ensures more efficient learning.
At first, we relentlessly collected, considered, and implemented edit suggestions and new content. Eventually, however, these suggestions slowed to a crawl, at which point we realized that our MBE flashcards must finally be hitting all of the highest-yield content taught by top bar prep courses like BarBri, Themis, Kaplan, Adaptibar, BarMax, Critical Pass, Quimbee, and others.
This became and remains a key benefit of Brainscape’s MBE flashcards: that they are an effective supplementary study tool to a wide range of popular bar prep courses. So no matter which provider you’re using—Kaplan bar prep, Critical Pass flashcards, BarMax, and many others—these bar exam flashcards will support your learning.
Today, Brainscape’s bar prep flashcards receive very few new edit suggestions and even fewer that meet the rigorous standards we have set for our existing collection. (In fact, most are now deemed invalid.) Even so, we continue to analyze every edit suggestion that comes in to ensure that these flashcards reflect the most up-to-date content taught in the top bar prep resources and materials.
