The most comfortable review schedule is: finish Civil Law, then start Remedial Law, then start Criminal Law. One subject at a time, each finished before the next begins. It feels orderly and productive, and by the second week of August it has usually produced a candidate who can discuss whichever subject they finished most recently and cannot retrieve the first four.
The alternative is to mix subjects — within a week, within a day, within a retrieval session. It feels worse, and it works better.
What interleaving actually does
Two mechanisms, both useful for a bar candidate.
Discrimination. When you study one topic in a block, the topic's cues are all around you, so recognising the rule is easy. When you mix topics, the first problem is deciding which rule applies — and that is precisely the skill the examination tests. A question does not arrive labelled "novation"; it arrives as a story about two people and a debt.
Spacing. Mixing subjects forces each subject's retrieval to be spread across the year rather than concentrated in one block. What gets spread gets repeated; what gets repeated survives. That is the mechanism described in spaced repetition for the bar, and interleaving is how you make it happen across eight subjects rather than within one.
The discomfort is the point. A mixed session produces more errors and more effort, and it is the errors that tell you where the learning is missing. A blocked session produces fluency — the feeling of having the material — that does not survive to September.
How to interleave without chaos
Interleaving does not mean studying randomly. Three levels, from cheapest to most disruptive:
Level 1 — mix the retrieval, not the learning
Learn a topic in its own block (blocking is right for first exposure; see below), but do the daily retrieval across subjects. Twenty minutes at the start of the day: five minutes on yesterday's topic, five on something from a fortnight ago in a different subject, ten on one applied question drawn from a third.
This is the single highest-value change, and it costs nothing: the learning still happens in coherent blocks, only the testing is mixed.
Level 2 — mix within the week
Instead of four sessions on one subject per week, do three on the main subject and two on a subject from earlier in the year. The earlier subject is not being re-learned; it is being kept alive at the maintenance interval.
A workable weekly shape:
| Day | Block |
|---|---|
| Mon | Current subject — new material |
| Tue | Current subject — new material |
| Wed | Earlier subject — retrieval and questions only |
| Thu | Current subject — new material |
| Fri | Earlier subject — retrieval and questions |
| Sat | Full timed answer, current subject, then mark it |
| Sun | Rebuild the week's outline from memory |
Level 3 — mix within a sitting
The examination itself alternates topics without warning: twenty problems in a four-hour block, drawn from anywhere in the syllabus. Practise that directly. Take ten past questions from five different topics, shuffle them, and answer them in a single timed block of two hours, forcing yourself to switch.
This is uncomfortable in exactly the way the paper is. It is also the only practice that rehearses the decision the real paper demands at the start of every question: what kind of question is this?
When blocking is still correct
Interleaving is a technique for material you have met. It is a poor technique for material you have not.
- First exposure to a hard, structured topic — civil procedure, say, or the tax code — should be blocked. You need enough continuous time to build the structure before mixing it with anything.
- A topic you have failed three times should be blocked again: go back to the text, rebuild the rule, and test it in isolation until it holds.
- The week before a subject's first full paper can be blocked on that subject; you are rehearsing a sitting, and the sitting is one subject.
The rule of thumb: block to learn, interleave to retain and to apply.
The cost, honestly
Interleaving makes every session feel less productive. You will end a mixed retrieval session with a longer list of failures than a blocked one — because a blocked session never asked you the questions you fail.
Two ways to keep the method from becoming demoralising:
- Count the failures, not the feeling. A list of six specific misses is a week's work; "I felt fluent" is not data.
- Keep one blocked session a week for the subject you are currently learning. The sense of progress matters for a year-long project, and one blocked session provides it honestly.
The August test
A year of interleaved review has one visible signature: in August, when you take a full paper in a subject you finished in November, you can still answer the questions. A blocked year has the other signature: the November subject produces blank pages and the panic that goes with them.
You can run that test early. In March, take a ten-question set from the subject you finished in October — no notes, timed. Whatever you score is the honest measure of whether your schedule is spaced or merely sequential. If it is bad, you have five months to fix the schedule, which is a much better position than discovering it in August.
Where the plan puts it
The twelve-month plan already rotates subjects within each phase and protects a daily retrieval block; interleaving is what that rotation is for. If you find yourself finishing one subject completely before touching the next, the plan is being followed in its letter and broken in its purpose.
The aim is not variety for its own sake. It is that on 5, 8 and 12 September 2027, eight subjects are available to you at once — because the paper asks for them at once.