The 7 foundational skills, the 12 tested MRPC rules, and strategy for integrated sets and performance tasks.
marks the 1 topic NCBE flags at memorize level — know these cold; the rest lean on provided materials and reasoning.
The 7 Foundational Skills
The seven Foundational Skills tested across the exam — issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, client relationship and management, legal research, and legal writing and drafting — and the defined tasks that measure them.
MRPC: The 12 Tested Rules★
The twelve Model Rules of Professional Conduct tested within integrated question sets — Rules 1.0, 1.1, 1.2(a) and (d), 1.3, 1.4, 1.6(a) and (c), 1.7, 3.1, 3.3(a)(1)–(2), 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 — applied from recalled knowledge without provided resources.
NCBE Key Words & Phrases
The NCBE key words and phrases that appear in exam prompts — argument and legal argument, dispositive fact, explain, factor, implication, issue, reason, specific, and support — and what each directs the examinee to do.
IQS Strategy
Strategy for integrated question sets: working through the shared factual scenario and provided resources, allocating time across the components, and approaching the mix of multiple-choice and short-answer items.
Performance Task Method
A method for the performance task: reading the File and Library efficiently, organizing a response to the assigned lawyering task, and writing to the format and audience the task specifies.
Legal Research Method
A method for research-based tasks: identifying the research questions to be answered, evaluating the roles and authoritative weight of provided sources, and reaching closure on a research question.
Skills & Ethics is where the exam’s 7 foundational skills and the tested rules of professional conduct live. The exam grades these through integrated question sets and performance tasks, so that is exactly how you practice them here — playable, timed, self-graded against rubrics.
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