- Sep 9, 2024
- 1,020
- 1,777
I would say Barbri has a couple of important pros and cons as a course provider, which makes it well-suited for some people but not others, depending on how you best learn. Its main advantages would include:
- Flexibility: as an online and self-paced course, you can study anywhere and at any time, for however long you want to. This means you can make your SQE prep fit the rest of your schedule, which makes Barbri a great fit for people who work part time, full time, or have other major commitments.
- Efficiency and saved time: the total amount of study time required by Barbri is overall lower than that of other course providers, as it does not include the LLM part of the course and also does not have many of the practical and somewhat time-consuming tasks like the other providers. Furthermore, you have the option to watch its lectures at 1.5 or 2x speed, which can enable you to go through the material quicker, and you also save a decent amount of time by not having to commute.
- Design of platform and planning: in my opinion, its the online platform is very easy to use, quite interactive, and makes it very easy to track progress and plan ahead. In particular, its PSP (Personal Study Plan) function allows you to specify what days you want to be working and what days you want to take breaks or vacations in and then automatically generates an evenly spread set of tasks to complete until the exams; this makes it easy to simply tick off lectures, readings, and tests every day as recommended by the PSP. By comparison, the other course providers seem to provide less step-by-step guidance to their students, who will as such sometimes use the available materials in quite different ways.
- Focus on MCQs: by comparison to the other providers, I would say Barbri has a way heavier emphasis on learning by doing, and in particular, learning by doing as many MCQs as possible throughout the course. Thus, you will get more exposure to MCQs, which some people say is the best way to prepare for the exam.
- Barbri covers less content than the other providers: Barbri's philosophy is to teach you really well the majority of the content, focusing on what comes up often, rather than trying to give you all the information that could possibly be relevant to an SQE question. This means that some subchapters (for instance, in business law, the chapter on balance sheets) are excluded almost entirely by Barbri. This in turn means that you could get a couple of questions in the SQE that you simply do not have any idea about.
- Barbri's MCQs are overall easier than those offered by the other course providers, and also easier than the actual SQE exams - in large part, because Barbri's questions are less heavy on the fact patters, which means there are less red herrings to distract you from the right answer. Thus, the experience with Barbri mocks may not be the most representative one for the actual exam; and the scores you get on Barbri tests may not be indicative of what you could expect to score on the SQE. To an extent that is true of all large course provides (bar Revise SQE and QLTS, which are thought to be the same/somewhat harder than the SQE), but it seems to me the general opinion is that the Barbri tests are the easiest among the major providers.
- Less socialising and support: with Barbri, you will not get to have a campus or classmates you meet with on a daily basis. This means that (i) you do not get the benefit of meeting people and making new connections; and (ii) you may not have access to all of the sets of notes and insider resources that people generally share with their classmates at the other course providers.
