How long should you study for the Ontario bar exams?

Long enough to read the materials twice and still have time left for practice questions. For most people sitting one exam that is seven to eleven weeks. For both in the same sitting it is twelve to sixteen.

Those numbers are not a rule of thumb. They come out of arithmetic you can do yourself, and doing it yourself is the point, because your reading speed is not ours.

Start with the page count

The materials are big, and candidates consistently underestimate them:

• Barrister: roughly 890 pages
• Solicitor: roughly 1,126 pages
• Both together: roughly 1,694 pages

That last number is not a typo, and it is not 2,016. If you sit both exams in the same sitting, a chunk of the material is identical in the two sets: the first fifteen chapters of Professional Responsibility and the appendices. You read those once, not twice, which is a genuine saving of 322 pages and one of the few real arguments for doing both together.

Then decide how many times you are reading it

Once is not enough. We tell candidates to plan for two passes, and it is the single most common place a study plan is too optimistic.

The first pass is comprehension. You are meeting the material, working out what is in it, and building the mental map that lets you find things later. Almost nobody retains enough from that pass to answer questions under time pressure.

The second pass is where it becomes usable. It is much faster than the first, and it is when the connections form.

So the real page count is double:

Now your own pace

Across a lot of candidates, someone studying around five hours a day gets through 45 to 60 pages. Some people are much faster, some are slower, and neither is a character flaw. What matters is that you use your number rather than ours.

Find it honestly. Read for an hour of genuine reading, the way you actually study, with your phone where it normally is, and count the pages. Then multiply.

At 45 to 60 pages a day, the reading alone works out to:

The part every plan forgets

That is reading. It is not preparation.

You also need time for practice questions, and not a token amount. Practice is where you find out that something you read and understood is not something you can apply to a fact pattern in ninety seconds. It is also the only way to find out where you are actually weak, as opposed to where you feel weak, and those are different lists for nearly everyone.

Budget at least a fifth of your total time for it, and do not stack it all at the end. Practice mixed into the reading tells you something while you can still act on it. Practice in the final week only tells you what you should have done.

Add a fifth of the reading time for practice, plus a final week kept deliberately light, and the totals come out as:

Those are bigger than the numbers most candidates have in their heads, and they are the reason this post exists. If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, our study planner does it with your own reading speed and gives you a start date.

If that number is bigger than the time you have

It often is, and the sitting is not going to move. A few things that genuinely help, in order of how much they help:

1. Consider sitting one exam rather than both. The exams run three times a year and you are not required to take them together. Two well-prepared sittings beat one rushed one, and the licensing process does not reward heroics.
2. Protect the second pass, not the first. If something has to give, it is better to read the first pass faster than to skip the second entirely.
3. Do not cut practice to buy reading time. This feels productive and is the trade most likely to cost you the exam, for the reason above.
4. Use focused practice where you are weakest rather than rereading whole chapters. Our subject quiz packs exist for this, but the principle holds whatever you use: rereading feels like progress and answering questions produces it.

The short version

• Plan to read the materials twice. Once is not enough.
• Barrister is roughly 890 pages, Solicitor roughly 1,126, both together roughly 1,694 rather than 2,016, because Professional Responsibility and the appendices overlap.
• At five hours a day most candidates cover 45 to 60 pages. Measure your own rate rather than trusting ours.
• Reading alone: about 5 to 6.5 weeks for Barrister, 6 to 8 for Solicitor, 9 to 12 for both.
• With practice and a light final week: 7 to 9 weeks for Barrister, 8 to 11 for Solicitor, 12 to 16 for both.
• Practice belongs mixed in, not saved for the end.
• If the arithmetic does not fit, sitting one exam this time is usually the better answer.

Next: take these numbers to the study planner and put your own dates in.