After months of intense development and extensive testing, we are proud to announce the availability of SofTest Mac on September 1st. SofTest Mac and SofTest Windows both have the same features, security levels, and a similar user experience. Additionally, your exam management/creation process won’t change. Your exams created after 9/1 will be compatible with both versions of SofTest, which means there is no need for duplicated efforts and you will be able to track student activity from a single interface. Please keep in mind that 9/1 is the date when we release new versions for all our products, so you will be prompted to upgrade all your ExamSoft applications. Finally, we understand this release may affect your exam administration planning and process. Please contact your Account Manager if you have any questions or are in need of help.

For the Fall 2010 release, SofTest Mac will be optional for every client. You can decide whether you want your students to have access to SofTest Mac. We believe SofTest Mac will be a wonderful alternative for students, but if you choose not to utilize SofTest Mac, your students will still be able to run SofTest on their Mac laptops via BootCamp.

By default, your account is set to NOT have access to SofTest Mac. If you wish to allow students to use SofTest Mac, please let us know by August 27, so that we can modify your account accordingly.

The System Requirements for SofTest Mac are:

” A Mac computer with an Intel processor
” OSX version 10.5.8 or higher (Leopard, Snow Leopard)
” 50MB or more free disk space (100MB recommended)
” 512MB or higher memory (1GB recommended)
” Internet connection for downloading / uploading exams

If you have any questions, concerns or plan to allow your students to have access to SofTest Mac, please let us know. We would appreciate hearing from you either way.

Regards,

Maribel Olvera
Director of Operations
ExamSoft Worldwide, Inc.

The MLS Bar Exam Software page has info on the following states:

• Alabama
• Alaska
• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Georgia
• Kentucky
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• Nebraska
• New York
• Oregon
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia

Most of the info for those states is at least a year old, so if you have more current info, please pass it my way so I can update the page. As always, thanks for your support.

Here are a few links that should help:

• PC to Mac: The Basics (a good overview video from Apple)
• Windows v. Mac Navigation (an Apple support page with info about interacting with files on the Mac)
• On Windows I used to… (another Apple support page, showing the Mac equivalents to common Windows commands/shortcuts/etc.)

Some earlier MLS posts address other questions you may have:

Will Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw (vitally important research tools) work with Mac browsers? – My review of eight Mac web browsers is over a year old, but it covers how each of the reviewed browsers works with Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw

Will a Mac work with my school’s exam software? – The short answer is almost always yes, with a caveat. The biggest exam vendor, ExamSoft, makes a package called SofTest, which is Windows-only. Most SofTest schools will allow you to use SofTest on your Mac, but you’ll have to set up Boot Camp and run Windows for the exam. All three of the other exam vendors provide Mac-native software. For more info about exam software, and a list with info about what software various schools use, check out the Exam Software Info page.

What software should I be using in law school? What do other students use? – Check out the Student Setups pages to see a wide variety of setups other students use.

I still have a question you haven’t answered. – Drop me a note.

It’s new, it’s shiny. Will it really help you prepare for the bar exam? I have no idea.

I didn’t take a practice course for a variety of reasons, but a good friend of mine took one with a one-on-one tutor at the same time I was preparing for the LSAT. She came out a point or two ahead of me when our results came back, but I think if we’d taken the test five times each, her average score would have been four or five points higher than mine. For one thing, she’s an amazing test-taker. She had also graduated from college relatively recently, and is really smart.

What I’m getting at here is that I’m not really sure that there’s a single best approach for LSAT success. For my friend, the one-on-one tutoring may have best suited her learning style. For me, going through practice tests and taking a lot of old exams helped.

Here are a few things I wish I’d done:

Check out the LSAT testing facility ahead of time – Do whatever you can to mitigate anxiety on LSAT day. Having the directions totally dialed in, knowing where the testing building is, figuring out parking, and yes, even knowing the location of the restrooms all would have helped.

Conduct better visualization – This one may sound a bit kooky, but if you’ve gone to the LSAT testing location, you can more easily guide yourself through visualization of the entire test day. I did some of this, but should have done more. Go through the process of waking up, going through your morning routine, getting to the testing location, sitting at the desk, taking the test calmly and cooly, and walking out feeling satisfied with your performance can help you do the same thing on exam day. Visualization works. Just ask Tiger Woods.

Monitor your mind – I had an analytical reasoning question at the end of the test that was a bit tricky. It was a typical ordering/segmenting question, but I could see daylight. I only had four or five questions to go, and instead of taking an extra 30 seconds to carefully doublecheck the parameters of the question, I went into autopilot. Belatedly I realized that due to some obfuscatory text in the question, I’d interpreted the call of the question incorrectly. 180 degrees incorrectly. Thrown off-balance by the error, instead of ditching the questing, moving through the remaining few questions, then circling back to the offending question, I maintained a doberman-like grip on the problem, spending precious time getting to the correct answer. I should have realized what I was doing and let the error go, but I was so fixated on getting that particular question right at that particular moment that I lost sight of the real goal, which is to get as many total questions correct as possible.

If you are in law school and already have the daunting task of LSAT prep and testing behind you, I’m curious which LSAT prep strategies you used, and how well you think they served you.

p.s. – If you’re wondering what books to read in preparation for law school, you may want to check out the Mac Law Students Bookstore at Amazon.com. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but so far it seems to be the least annoying way of trying to cover some of the costs of running MLS.