NCA candidates and the Ontario licensing exams

If you have come through the NCA route, you have already passed a set of Canadian law examinations, usually while working, often at a distance. You do not need to be told how to study.

What catches NCA candidates out on the Ontario licensing examinations is not difficulty. It is that the two sets of exams reward almost opposite habits, and the habits that got you through the NCA are the ones you have most practised.

Same open book, a different exam

Both sets of exams are open book, and in both you have your print materials with you. That is where the similarity ends.

An NCA paper asks for written answers. You plan, organise and write, and the marks are for the quality of the analysis: identifying the issue, stating the rule, applying it to the facts, reaching a conclusion, in that order. Time is spent building an argument.

The Barrister and Solicitor papers are multiple choice: 160 questions, four options each, one best answer, in 4.5 hours. Nobody reads your reasoning. The marks are for locating the governing rule quickly, telling the best option from a close second, and holding that pace across a sitting longer than any NCA paper. A candidate who knows exactly where to look and takes forty seconds beats a candidate who knows the answer but spends four minutes confirming it, because both get one point and only one of them still has time for the rest of the paper.

The habit that costs NCA candidates most is the one that served them best: working the problem fully. On these papers, the analysis you would have written is time you no longer have.

Volume is the other shock

The combined Barrister and Solicitor materials run to roughly 1,700 pages. That is not a number you get through by reading harder in the last month. Most candidates reading around five hours a day manage 45 to 60 pages. Do the arithmetic before you commit to a sitting, because the answer changes what is possible.

Our study planner does that arithmetic from the real page counts and your own reading speed, and tells you the date you need to start rather than the date you would like to.

Your index is the exam

For most candidates the index matters more than any single subject. It is what converts 1,700 pages into something you can query in under a minute under pressure.

Two things follow. Build it, or buy one, early enough to practise with it, because an index you have never used at speed is a book you cannot navigate. And practise looking things up against a clock, not just reading.

What does not change

The law is the law, and you already have the harder half of the skill: reading a fact pattern in an unfamiliar system and working out what is being asked.

Why we say this with some confidence

LexPD has been preparing candidates for the Ontario bar examinations for over 12 years, thousands of them, a good number of whom came through the NCA route. So we have watched a lot of people make this exact transition, and the pattern is consistent enough that we can usually predict which habit will cost someone marks before they sit a paper.

The fastest way to find out which one is yours is to sit a full paper under real conditions and read the report. Our practice exams run the same format, timing and pressure as the real thing, and the report ranks what to work on first by the marks actually at stake on your paper.