It’s Week Five of bar prep, and you’re right on track. Every day, you sit down at your desk and start working through the items on your study schedule. Lectures, check! Reading the outline, check! Practice MBE questions, check! Practice essays, check! When your alarm confirms that you’ve spent eight full hours in your chair, you stop for the day, feeling great about yourself and all the progress you’ve made.

There’s just one problem: the bar examiners don’t hand out gold stickers to the examinees with the most checkmarks on their to-do lists. Right answers on test day are all that matter, not how many hours of lectures you’ve listened to or how many practice questions you’ve taken. Far too many bar-preppers lose sight of the distinction between artificial goals—like completing every assignment in their prep courses—and real ones, like mastering the substantive material and learning how to take the test. Here are some tips for keeping your priorities straight and making sure you’re doing the work you actually need to do to pass the bar.

Put planning in its place.

Don’t get us wrong—planning is important! There’s a mountain of information to learn for the bar, and if you don’t take an organized approach, you’ll quickly find yourself dangling off the edge of a cliff. You should absolutely have a study plan and try, within reason, to stick to it. You should absolutely break big tasks down into bite-sized ones.

The message here isn’t that you should avoid making schedules and lists and using them to structure your prep. It’s that you should avoid the mistake of believing that going through the motions is the point—or that it’s enough to pass. Don’t think of the daily targets you set for lectures or practice questions as goals in themselves. They are part of a larger framework to help you achieve the only goal that matters: understanding the legal rules and how they’re tested on the exam.

Engage actively.

How do you get past the box-checking mindset and make your eight hours a day (or six or ten) really count? Well, the more actively you engage with the information, the more you train your brain to store it, retrieve it, and apply it. Active engagement means making the most of whatever lectures, outlines, practice questions, and other assignments your bar prep course provides. But ideally, it also means supplementing those materials with tools of your own design:

• Use color-coding.

• Make flashcards.

• Devise acronyms for high-yield items, like the hearsay exceptions.

• Draw decision trees that walk you through multistep analyses.

• List questions that come to mind during lectures, and fill in the answers when you find them.

• Write your own hypotheticals to imagine how rules play out in real life.

• Put sticky notes on the bathroom mirror, and review hard-to-remember topics while you brush your teeth.

You may have experimented with some of these strategies and others in college or law school. If so, pick a few that worked best for you, and apply them to your bar prep. If not, invest in a little trial and error.

Do these things take time? Yes, they do. Are they worth the extra effort? Yes, they are. Passive learning will only get you so far with material this voluminous and complex. To cross the finish line, you need to do whatever’s necessary to own the information. For many examinees, it’s what they do beyond their prep-course checklists that makes the difference on test day; it’s also the part of prep they find most fun (yes, fun!) and satisfying.

Measure your progress, and adapt.

If your only goal is completing your daily checklist, it’s pretty simple to track your progress. When your aim is to learn everything you need to know for the bar, that’s a little harder to measure. It’s essential, though, that you reevaluate your approach to learning along the way. You don’t want your exam result to be the first sign of success or trouble. So, how do you assess how it’s going and decide whether it’s time to make some adjustments?

Start by picking a measure of learning that reflects what you know about yourself. How do you know when you know something? Don’t worry. This isn’t undergrad philosophy class; it’s a practical question. You’ve been studying for tests all your life, so no one is better equipped to determine when you’ve committed something to memory. Check in regularly with whatever benchmarks you have. Do what you’ve done in the past to figure out if you’ve thoroughly mastered a topic or need more work.

You should also assess your progress with tasks that require “retrieval” of topics you’ve recently covered, which means recalling the information without referring to the lecture or outline it came from. Cognitive science research shows that retrieval is a superior learning method compared with other forms of repetition. It not only shows whether you learned the material the first time around, but also reinforces the material in your memory, making it easier to recall and apply it the next time you need it. It’s an assessment tool and a learning tool all in one! Here are three ways to practice retrieval with legal rules for the bar:

• List key terms as you listen to a lecture or read an outline. Then step away from your study aids and quiz yourself about those topics. How much can you remember? Can you list the elements of a tort or a crime? Can you summarize the test for getting a TRO? If not, review the relevant part of the lecture or outline, and try again later.

• Revisit practice questions you missed the first time around. After you review the explanation for a missed question, wait a couple of days, and try the question a second time. Can you retrieve what you learned from the explanation to get the question right? If not, do you remember enough to get down to two answer choices and make a reasonable guess?

• Explain tough concepts to another person from memory. Nothing cements information in your mind quite like teaching it in plain English. If the only audience available is a law school friend, that’s fine, but a person with no legal background is even better. If you can answer a layperson’s questions about procedural due process or the Dormant Commerce Clause, you’re rocking your con law review!

Whenever you assess your learning, be open to making changes in your approach if something isn’t going well. Maybe you need to spend more time on a particular substantive area. Maybe you need more sticky notes and fewer lecture notes, or vice versa. Resist the temptation to get locked into a learning pattern that isn’t working for you. Stay flexible, and mix it up.

Treat yourself!

As you see your active learning begin to pay off, be ready to celebrate your accomplishments. It’s great for morale and motivation, and let’s face it: you deserve it! Bar prep is hard. It’s inherently stressful. It’s often tedious. But it doesn’t have to be joyless.

To “earn” your treats, set goals that are both meaningful and attainable. Prioritize quality, not quantity—remember, we’re not checking boxes here. Instead of “I’m going to finish 100 practice questions today,” tell yourself, “I want to get 70% of my practice questions right today.” If you meet that goal, live it up for an hour. Order a pizza, play with your pet, call a friend, watch some Netflix, go for a run, or take a nap. When it’s time to return to your desk, remember all your effort is building toward the ultimate reward: becoming a member of this profession you’ve worked so hard to join.