California Bar prep built from your own outlines.

The California Bar Examination runs over two days and is administered twice a year, in February and July. It has three parts: five one-hour essay questions, one 90-minute Performance Test, and the Multistate Bar Examination — 200 multiple-choice questions written by the NCBE.

You need a total scaled score of 1390 out of 2000 to pass. Scores below 1350 after one reading fail; between 1350 and 1390 the written answers are read a second time by a different set of graders.

The Performance Test is the component most people under-prepare, because it is not a knowledge test at all — you are handed a File and a Library and judged on what you do with them under time. That is why it gets its own mode here rather than being folded into essay practice.

The Performance Test is worth dwelling on, because it is the component people most often leave until last and it is the one that behaves least like law school. You are given a File — the facts, correspondence, transcripts — and a Library of the authority you are meant to use, and you are judged on the memo or brief you produce in ninety minutes. Nothing is being recalled. It is a drafting and triage exercise, and it is practisable in a way that memorised doctrine is not.

The MBE tests seven subjects. California examines a wider set on the written side, and several of the additions are precisely where California law parts company with the majority rule you were taught for the multiple-choice paper. That is the trap: the better you know the national answer, the more confidently you can write the wrong one.

Three divergences do most of the damage. California is a community property state, which has no MBE analogue at all — characterisation, tracing, commingling and reimbursement are a body of law you either studied or did not. California applies its own Evidence Code rather than the Federal Rules, so a hearsay or privilege answer that is right on the MBE can be wrong in an essay. And California has its own Rules of Professional Conduct, which are built on the ABA Model Rules but are not identical to them — a distinction that matters more on the essays than on the MPRE.

This is the concrete reason a generic bar question bank underperforms here. A bank written for a national audience optimises for the majority rule, because that is what sells in every other jurisdiction. It will drill you fluently toward answers California does not accept, and it will barely touch the subjects California adds. Drilling against your own California outlines does not have that bias, because the material came from your course.

One piece of timing worth knowing: California has approved the NextGen UBE for the July 2028 administration, with a California-specific component following in July 2029. If you are sitting before that, this page is your format. If you are sitting after, read NextGen + California instead — the subjects change and so does the structure.