The MPRE, Complete

Eight questions come up before anyone starts. The answers all sit in the study schedules; here they are in one place.

Do I read the whole book first? No. A chapter's ten questions run the day you finish that chapter, its cards the day after, and the first practice bank round opens on day 3 of the 14-day plan. Reading straight through and starting questions afterward is the one sequence all three plans avoid.

How many questions a day? In the 14-day plan, between thirty and eighty-one on a reading day: thirty chapter-end questions plus whatever bank round sits on that row. On an exam day, add its 60. Price each at three minutes, because that's what one costs when you read its explanation.

When do I sit the exams? At the points your plan marks — days 9, 11 and 13 in the 14-day plan, days 5 and 6 in the seven-day plan, days 9, 16, 23 and 29 in the month. Each is 60 questions in 120 minutes, sat unbroken, with an hour of explanations on the day after — except exam 1 in the seven-day plan, which reads its explanations the same evening.

What are the flashcards for? A card checks whether a rule is in your head; a question checks whether you can use it once a call is put to you. The deck does the first job only. Price a card at about 25 seconds.

Which plan do I take? Seven days costs about 51 hours, at 7 h 20 m a day; fourteen days about 54, at 3 h 53 m; a month about 57, at 1 h 55 m. All three schedule the same material, so the extra days buy spacing and another practice exam, not more content. If a day slips, cut in the order the plan prints: the second read of the strategy module, then the cards, then the back half of the longest bank round. Never the explanations, and never an exam.

What do I do the night before? The last evening closes the same way in every plan: the review sheet's second half, chapters 13 through 24, ten minutes as a lookup, not a read; then the one-sheet's two sides, twenty minutes, said out loud rather than read; then fifteen minutes on the strategy module you first read on day 1. Nothing new goes in that close. What sits ahead of it is whatever your plan's last row still carries — the seven-day plan ends its practice bank there, and plays its marked-wrong cards that evening too.

Is the one-sheet where I start? No. It compresses rules you have already met, and until you have met them it reads as a list of unfamiliar names.

Do I need anything else? No — the set closes its own loops. Outside these pages there are two jobs: register with the NCBE, and check your jurisdiction's passing score.

---

How the exam works

The MPRE is a computer-based multiple-choice test administered at Pearson VUE test centers three times a year. You have 120 minutes to answer 60 questions. Only 50 of those questions are scored; the remaining 10 are unscored pretest items the NCBE is calibrating for future exams, indistinguishable from the real ones. You won't know which is which, so treat every question as scored.

Each question offers four answer choices with one best answer. There's no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank is strictly worse than a guess. Raw scores are converted to a scaled score between 50 and 150; passing cutoffs are set by each jurisdiction, typically between 75 and 86.

The content split is stable year to year. Most questions test the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct — the rules that govern lawyers. Judicial conduct under the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct is 2 to 8 percent, the share the two judicial-conduct chapters' topic lines print. What is left is the surrounding law of lawyering (malpractice, disqualification, the constitutional constraints on regulation, and the civil-liability doctrines that shadow the disciplinary rules). Each chapter prints its own subject and that subject's published share, so the weights are on the chapters themselves.

The MPRE tests what the rules say, not what any one state does with them. When state law diverges, the exam follows the Model Rules and the Model Code.

---

What is in the set, and the order to use it

Ten files make up the set. Each entry below says what the file is and the point in the work where you reach for it.

1. The book — 24 chapters, ordered to build doctrine rather than to follow the code. One chapter is one sitting: read it once, actively, and do its ten questions before you open the next.
2. Chapter-end questions — 240 questions, 10 per chapter, with answers and explanations. Sit a chapter's ten the moment you finish that chapter, while the rule is still in front of you.
3. Practice bank — 602 questions in 8 topic rounds and 2 mixed rounds, with answers and explanations. A round comes after the chapters that teach its topic, once you hold that block whole.
4. Practice exams — 4 timed exams, 60 questions and 120 minutes each. Sit one at each milestone your schedule marks, unbroken and timed, and review every miss before you move on.
5. Flashcards — the core deck, 331 cards, one fact each, weighted by how often the exam tests each rule. Run a chapter's cards the day after you read that chapter, then run again the ones that came back wrong.
6. One-sheet — one sheet, two sides: the 28 rules that carry most of the marks. Carry it through the last 48 hours; it's the shortest route back to the rules that decide the most questions.
7. Exam strategy — how the exam is scored and paced, the call decoder, the five steps, the eleven wrong answers. Read it on the first day, before chapter 1, and again on the last night. The method is set out there in full, and these pages don't repeat it.
8. Study schedules — 7-day, 14-day and 1-month plans. Pick the plan that fits the time you have and work its rows in order; what each day costs is priced there.
9. Review sheet — the 24 night-before checklists in one place. It's the last 48 hours, chapter by chapter, in the book's own order.
10. Rule index — every rule and the chapter that teaches it. Reach for it after a miss, to land on the section that owns the rule.

Reading gets you to competence; the questions, the rounds and the timed exams get you to a score. When time runs short, cut reading depth before you cut a timed exam.

---

How to read a page

The same labels come back on almost every page. Here is the job each one is doing.

Why this rule exists.

the reason the rule was written, so you can reason your way back when memory fails.

Plain English.

the rule box below it, said again in ordinary words. Nothing is added and nothing is dropped.

Worked example.

one set of facts run all the way to an answer, the way an exam item runs.

TRAP.

the wrong turn this rule invites, named before you take it.

TIP.

a shortcut, a memory hook, or a faster way to see the answer.

Night-before checklist

the chapter squeezed down to what you reread the night before the exam.

The rule box carries the rule itself under a bold header naming it; everything around it is derived from it, so read it slowest. Quick review marks doctrine that another chapter teaches in full, and names the chapter that teaches it.

---

This is a free MPRE course. First edition, 2026. Ten files: what they are, what they aren't, how a rule is taught here, and why none of it costs anything.

What it is. The tested subject, written out whole. Twenty-four chapters teach the twelve subjects at the weight the exam gives them; How the exam works holds the exam's own numbers. Around the chapters sit 1,082 questions — at the chapter ends, in the practice bank's ten rounds, and in four timed exams — every one of them answered with an explanation that argues all four choices. Then the rest of the set: a card deck, a one-sheet, an exam-strategy module, three study schedules, a review sheet, and an index of every rule. What is in the set prices each of them.

What it isn't. There are no video lectures; the explaining happens on the page, beside the rule it explains. And there are no state variations here — the book teaches the Model Rules and the Model Code, which is what this exam asks about.

How a rule is taught, in the same order every time. First, why the rule exists — the problem it was written to stop, so you can rebuild it at minute 90 when the wording has gone. Second, plain English: the rule in ordinary words, nothing added and nothing dropped. Third, the rule itself, in the rule box; read that slowest, because everything around it derives from it. Fourth, a worked example, run all the way to an answer. And where a rule invites a wrong turn, the trap — named before you take it, with the reason it's tempting.

Why it's free. The rules this exam tests are published in codes a court has adopted, and nobody owns a public edict. The writing on top of them is finished, another copy costs nothing to make, and Open Bar Review intends to keep it that way.

Read the strategy module first, before any law. Then pick one of the three schedules and work its rows in order — each plan interleaves the reading, the questions and the exams for you, and each closes with the review sheet and the one-sheet.

— The editor, Open Bar Review