What Basketball Analytics Can Tell Us About Prioritizing Bar Exam Topics

The Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics last night, forcing a deciding Game 7 in the Eastern Conference Finals on Sunday for a trip to the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

The Heat’s Jimmy Butler scored 47 points based on 55% field goal shooting and went 4 for 8 behind the three-point arc. As a team, the Heat attempted 35 three-point shots and 78 regular, two-point field-goal attempts. The Heat’s three-point attempts equaled 31% of the team’s total shot selections.

I thought that number was a high percentage of three-point attempts, so I investigated the history of three-point shooting in the NBA over the past 10 years. What I discovered may help you prioritize the topics that you’re reviewing on the bar exam.

According to the NBA, the league-wide three-point rate (the percentage of all field goal attempts that have come from beyond the arc) has increased in each of the last 10 seasons, rising from 22.2% in 2010-11 to 39.2% in 2020-21. And it has increased more in the last five years than it did in the previous five years.

Why?

Interestingly, at least to me, it's the result of the proliferation of the shot chart, a representation of where players are shooting from, and whether they make it or not.

In the early 2000s, statistics and analytics were mostly underutilized in basketball, with most number-crunching in the sport based on spreadsheets and linear regression rather than spatial and visual reasoning. In other words, mapping shots in the NBA wasn’t widespread.

But around 2010, things changed, thanks to Kirk Goldsberry, a basketball writer for ESPN and a FiveThirtyEight contributor. Goldsberry is also the former vice president for strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs, the lead analyst for Team USA Basketball, and a visiting researcher who taught cartography at the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences.

In his book, “SprawlBall: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA,” Goldsberry examined the history of the NBA’s three-point line and how players and teams are using it to change the game.

While doing his research, Goldsberry expected to see a marked decrease in ﬁeld-goal percentage with greater distance. He expected to see closer jump shots made a higher percentage than farther jump shots. While his findings were true, the effect was much more subtle than he expected.

Goldsberry discovered that NBA players make only 40 percent of their shots between 8 and 9 feet from the rim, but that number drops to only 35 percent between 25 and 26 feet from the rim. (The NBA three-point arc is about 22 feet to the center of the rim.)

In an article for FiveThirtyEight, Goldsberry wrote:

If it’s true that 3-point shots go in 36 percent of the time and 10-foot shots go in just 40 percent of the time, then why are we assigning 50 percent more value to shots from beyond that magical little arc?

The natural landscape depicted in the ﬁeld-goal percentage map demonstrates that jump shooting in the NBA is essentially a 35 to 45 percent proposition; however, some of those shots are worth 3 and some are worth 2. Naturally, as basic economics would predict, the behavior of players and teams has reacted in the form of shot selection. When we overlay the most common 200 shot locations in today’s NBA, we see that shot selection and economic efficiency are aligned.

No wonder 2-point jump shooting is dying.

To put it another way, NBA players and teams are realizing that they can improve their offense simply by changing their shot selection. Take more threes, score more points—50% more points while sacrificing very little in attempts-made field-goal percentage.

How can this help you prioritize the topics that you’re reviewing on the bar exam?

Think about some topics within MBE subjects as three-point shots and other topics within the same MBE subject as two-point shots. Think about how you’re going to get more “bang for your buck,” so to speak, for knowing a particular topic compared to another topic. Since some topics are tested in larger numbers than other topics (the three-point shots), it simply makes sense to spend more time studying those topics compared to other topics where fewer questions will appear on the bar exam (the two-point shots).

For example, half of the 25 Torts MBE questions will test negligence. On the other hand, there might be one or two questions on invasion of privacy. If you can correctly answer 70% of the negligence questions, then you will earn about 17 raw points (25 questions x 70% correct). However, if you answer 70% of the invasion of privacy questions, then you will earn, at most, two points (2 questions x 70%)—and even that might be a little generous.

Sure, answering those one or two invasion of privacy questions is important, just like you would want to try to correctly answer everyone question. But you don’t want to sacrifice study time that’s needed to understand negligence for other areas of the bar exam where there will be a limited number of questions for you to earn raw points.

You can increase your raw points on the MBE by performing well in those areas of the exam where more raw points are available to earn. The more raw points you can earn, the higher your scaled score on the MBE will be.

So what topics within each MBE subject should you focus on? Here are my suggestions, based on the distributions identified in the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ Subject Matter Outline:

Civil Procedure

“Jurisdiction and venue,” “Pretrial procedures,” and “Motions” make up two-thirds of the Civil Procedure MBE questions.

Constitutional Law

“Individual rights”—including Due Process, Equal Protection, and First Amendment freedoms—makes up 50% of the Constitutional Law MBE questions.

Contracts

“Formation of contracts” and “Performance, breach, and discharge” make up 50% of the Contracts MBE questions.

Criminal Law and Procedure

“Constitutional protection of accused persons” under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments makes up 50% of the Criminal Law and Procedure MBE questions.

Evidence