[blindlaw] Writing the bar exam

[Graham Hardy]

Hi Ben,

I wrote the bar in British Columbia and had a similar experience (though a much smaller number of questions). Two things were helpful. First, when I approached the Law Society, they gladly provided me their source files in Microsoft Word format. These were, of course, formatted for printing and I had to clean up their formatting quite a bit. I also applied heading styles so that I could jump around using JAWS quick navigation commands. I knew that many students used indices but I didn't bother trying to rely on those, as I knew that having a page number would only point to a rather large section of a document, given the small font, and it would have taken longer to search things out. In addition to headings, which helped me navigate quickly to places I was very familiar with, I used the text search commands to look for words in areas which I hadn't indexed. Above all, tempting as it may be to use the open book as a crutch, it cannot be emphasised too much that having an open book should be a memory aid and can slow anyone down, sighted or blind, who has to look things up for every question. You should try as much as humanly possible to be familiar with the material.

Let me know if you have any other questions.


Graham Hardy | Lawyer  604-608-2043 | ghardy at harrisbrun.com 


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-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ben Fulton via BlindLaw
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 6:38 AM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Cc: Ben Fulton
Subject: [blindlaw] Writing the bar exam


Hi all,

I am currently studying for the Ontario bar. It is a two day 480 question exam that covers about 2,000 pages of material.

The exam is open book, and the scores are curved. I'm having a hard time dealing with the index.

Sighted students talk a lot about having tabs, and indexes that they can use to quickly look up the information they need. Time is a large component of the exam, and even though I will have twice as much time, making this a four day exam, I am still concerned about the time to look things up quickly.

For starters, the pdf file they sent was difficult to use, so I converted it to a word file, but this expanded the number of pages. So any index that other people have for this already will not work, because the page numbers won't line up.

Ideally, I would most likely want an html type of document with embedded links, then I could use the jaws find for specific words, and click on links within an index to quickly go to where I need to.

However, I have no idea how to format that.

If anyone has anysuggestions for writing the bar I would appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Ben



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