The perfect example of why we need antitrust laws.

BARBRI is flaky in the quality of its lecturers. There is no feasible alternative available, as it has cornered the market. The next-closest competition is PMBR, which does only Multistate multiple choice topics, and may or may not suck (my interactions with the PMBR head rep for the school have given me an impression that the latter holds true). Yet, for all its inconsistency, BARBRI still manages to fleece around $2800/student because of our fear of passing the bar. Furthermore, the general consensus is that most people need BARBRI to pass a state bar, making the program not a choice for a study aid, but a prerequisite to practice law. Just look at the numbers:

Bar Exam (OR): $525.00

BARBRI (approx): $2,800.00

BABRI costs over 5x the amount of the bar exam. Obviously, you can't hedge your bets on taking the bar five times because of the fact that there is a lost opportunity cost each time you fail the exam, and BARBRI guarantees a high level of passage (in the 90% range). But can you hedge your bets for at least one failure of the bar (I don't intend to fail, and I AM taking BARBRI, so this is purely hypothetical). Let's make a few assumptions.

First, assume that Student fails the bar exam once and must take it again. He did not take BARBRI. He works from August to the beginning of December, then stops working to study again for the bar, without using BARBRI again. Only because of these economic times, let's just assume that people who pass the bar (and obstentially have taken BARBRI) aren't finding attorney jobs and are therefore in the same working pool as you (either as clerks, non-traditional legal jobs, or non-legal jobs) being paid the same amount as you. Clerks traditionally get paid around $12-15/hr, barring outliers like the BPA, which pays $18.75-ish. Here's a rough estimate of some of the costs you lose by taking the bar exam again:

Bar Exam: $525.00 (no, you can't take it for free after failing once)

3 months of non-work (assume $15/hr): $15/hr * 40 hrs/week * 12 weeks = $7,200

Total Cost: $7725.00 versus $2,800 you spent on BARBRI.

Obviously I have no pass rate/fail rate percentages, which makes a lot of this meaningless in terms of realy cost-benefit analysis (you'd need to know the differential rate of passage between people who have taken BARBRI and not taken BARBRI, etc.). But it provides a basic level of assurance that you most likely did spend your money wisely, even though the professors suck.