There is a good chance that the bar exam will be the least enjoyable experience of your entire legal career. Passing the state bar exam is required in order to be admitted as a lawyer in that state. Each state has its own variation of the examination, but most share certain components.

The first component, the Multistate Bar Exam, is the same in every state. It consists of 200 multiple-choice questions prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) covering a range of legal topics, including contracts, constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, evidence, property and torts. You will have six hours to answer these questions, in two periods of three hours each. This gives you a little less than two minutes per question. The MBE questions are not short. A question might be several sentences long and each answer will probably also be a sentence or two. In other words, you'll probably need the whole six hours to complete the exam. The District of Columbia and all states except Louisiana and Washington require lawyers to have passed the MBE.

Virtually every state bar exam includes a second, and sometimes even a third, day of essays. Some exams tailor questions to their state's laws (for example, California, New York, Maryland, North Carolina), while other states use the Multistate Essay Exam as their essay section. The Multistate Essay Exam consists of six essay questions spread over the course of three hours. Other states have their own format. Some topics might be familiar to you from your law school classes (like contracts, real property and torts), but others will only ring a bell if you took the course as an elective (such as wills, family law, conflict of laws or corporations). There will be as many as 20 different areas of law that you need to study.

Another component common to most bar exams is known as the Multistate Performance Test. This section is designed to test your lawyering abilities and responses to ethical dilemmas and clients. Not all states use this in their bar exams, and some only use part of it (New York, for example, has only one Multistate Performance question, while other states include more). This section is generally only allotted an hour or two.

Finally, before you graduate from law school, you will probably be required to take an ethics test, known as the Multistate Professional Responsibility Test. The MPRE is a little over two hours long and consists of 50 multiple-choice questions designed to measure your knowledge of ethical standards of the legal profession. The exam is offered by the NCBE three times a year, in March, August and November. If you are not required by your state to take the MPRE, you might be subject to a separate ethics section when you take your bar exam.

All in all, the bar exam is like a two- to three-day legal marathon. You will prepare for it for months and study as you have never studied before. It will often seem that you can't possibly learn as much as you're expected to. Don't despair; as a general rule, more people pass than fail any bar exam and, if you do fail the first time around, you can take it again.

If you already have a job lined up, then your firm may pay for a bar review course such as BAR/BRI or PMBR. Public service and government agencies usually will not pay for this course. Whether it's paid for or not, however, it's highly recommended that you enroll in some kind of course to prepare for your bar exam. There are just too many subjects to cover, many of which you will never have seen before in your law school career, and attending a course regularly will help you develop an organized approach to studying. These courses outline all the requirements for your state's bar exam and review all the legal subjects that may be covered on the exam. You will probably start studying for the bar soon after graduation and take the exam in the summer. Many states offer the exam in late July. Most bar exams are offered at least twice and possibly four times a year, so you can take more time to prepare, if your firm allows it.

Most law firms allow you to take the bar exam again if you failed it the first time. Government agencies such as prosecutors' offices usually won't give you a second chance. Even so, it's quite common for some attorneys to take the bar twice or even three times. Your scores are not cumulative or dependent on each other, and you will only need to pass once.