Just what exactly did I pay Barbri more than $2000 for?

Cause where I'm sitting at the moment, I couldn't answer that question. Seriously?!?! I became thoroughly irritated earlier this week when a friend of mine was reducing her familiy law outline and got a puzzled look on her face. Fortunately for us, she used to work for the state legislature and had something stick in her brain about a funky family law issue that Barbri had under our state's distinctions. Well, after about 3 minutes on westlaw, she found out that the funky "state law distinction" had been REPEALED! ALMOST FOUR YEARS AGO. HELLO!?! WTF? I died a little inside. It's a frequently tested issue. And now my state does it like everyone else instead of bizarro. And Barbri, well, either they are lazy and cheap and didn't want to spend the resources to update my state's law or they knew they didn't have to because where the hell else am I supposed to go? Sift through my state's code and common laws in all my spare time? Right.

So fast forward to today, when we began our simulated exam. My first complaint is, really, I have to grade them? And I get the infeasibility of grading so many essays in any kind of a timely manner. Fine. But then, if you don't, Barbri, you owe me a point break down of the answers, and failing that, you owe me model answers actually written in the blasted format that you keep harping on about being so damn important. It is lame and excessively insufficient to merely give me what amounts to a bulleted list of issue-spotting with an occasional rule thrown in. All I can see is that I did worse than I thought, but I'm not sure how necessarily to make it better. So thanks for nothing on that end. Oh, and by the way, it would be nice if you updated the answers that claim to be specific to my state like on my ethics essay. It was half-assed at best and completely WRONG on two of the three points. So thanks again. Glad I've been studying that and that the lecturer you sent for the ethics stuff had done his homework for 2008 and could tell me what the law is now.

And how is it even imaginable that it will take you 9 days to return my "graded" scantron? It's a scantron for crying out loud. Me taking it 3 weeks before the test so that you can give me my score 1.5 weeks before the test seems like a total waste of everyone's time. Of course, I can and will mark my answers in my book so that I can grade it the next day.

But what is it that I paid you so much money for?

I don't get it. I'm sure the lecturers don't come cheap, at least not the really big ones that give you cred. But you dupe them a million times, so the recurring cost there has got to be pretty minimal. And the many forests killed in the printing of the books, yeah, that's probably not cheap either. Room rentals. Graders (who are worthless... it's a joke when everyone in my class gets the same number grade each week with a note that says: "good writing, but check the law.") The "local" attorney who is supposed to . . . yeah, I've still got no idea what he was supposed to actually do for us.

When I sit back and look at what I thought the real value would be in your course, it was for the state law stuff. Which is usually horribly inadequate, disjointed, and evidently wrong because at least some of it hasn't been updated in a while. The rest of the stuff you provide, meh. I could buy your books off ebay or a classmate. I could poke myself with a stick to make sure that I didn't fall asleep reading the big outlines which would more than compensate for not hearing most of the lectures. It's the state law stuff that I don't have time to google and westlaw for the myriad subjects that my state tests.

It's a good thing that courts generally don't second guess the value of consideration because I'd be on that like peanut butter on a kid.