Don't fight the hypo

I've been struggling with the fact that each fact pattern, each question and each answer are told, written and asked for in a vacuum, and during one round of Barbri one of the temps relinquished a valuable piece of advice that I have been wrestling with since, "Don't fight the hypo."

What he meant was to only read the facts as stated in the hypothetical. Don't impute your own. Don't ask, "what if?" because the fact pattern and question provides you with all that is and will ever be in this minute, limited fictional universe.

I have this reflex, innate or trained, to ponder out the "what ifs?," the "but what abouts?" that inevitably occur in a bare-bones-fact pattern. My hand tries to raise, to ask the videotaped professor about the tendons, the nerves, the organs, the muscle and the skin, but these elements of anatomy are irrelevant. If you're given a skeleton, work with a skeleton whether or not it could, in reality, ever have the capacity to walk on its own.

Today the contracts temp expressed the sentiment perfectly, "There are no real world bar questions."

That's it, simply put by a man who has been teaching aspiring lawyers, for about 30 years, how to pass the test that will determine whether or not they are fit to be attorneys, to be responsible for the most important transactions, arguments, occurrences and issues that their clients will ever have to deal with.

I respect that we should be able to work with what we're given, that this skill is valuable in any field, profession or activity, and I might sound like a broken record at this point, but I'm still trying to figure out a good reason as to why the legal profession tests this way.

The bar is set in a fictional universe, one not grounded by gravity nor run by any physical science we know. Each bar, and really each question, lives in its own world, detached from time, detached from space, detached from reality, but the test's job is to determine which graduates are fit to be attorneys. I continue to find difficulty reconciling these two facts.

The only reasonable conclusion I can come up with is that the bar is hard, that they give us this test because it's hard. That, and because they had to do it.