Mary Basick

Assistant Dean for Academic Skills

Expertise:

Academic skills, bar exam preparation

Mary Basick joins UCI Law from Southwestern Law School, where she led the law school to historic bar passage success. For over a decade, she has successfully designed programs, developed innovative and engaging curricula, and taught courses in academic skills and bar preparation. Dean Basick utilizes best practices, effective teaching pedagogy, and cognitive learning theory to develop academic skills programming, which enables students to master legal skills and maximize their efforts.

Dean Basick has written several popular books on bar preparation with longtime collaborator Tina Schindler. Their bar preparation books are concise and practical, condensing vast amounts of substantive law into manageable concepts presented in a useful and easily understandable format. Together they authored the bar preparation bestsellers Essay Exam Writing for the California Bar Exam (Wolters Kluwer, 2nd ed. 2020) and California Performance Test Workbook (Wolters Kluwer, 2nd ed. 2020). Their most recent book, MBE Decoded-Multistate Bar Exam (Wolters Kluwer 2021), takes a fresh approach to Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) study. The book was inspired by redesigning an MBE course for their students, resulting in vastly improved MBE scores. In addition, Dean Basick authored the Multistate Bar Exam flash card set for the Emanuel Law in a Flash series and other various bar preparation materials.

Dean Basick has spent her career as an educator devoted to assisting all students in achieving  their full potential, with particular focus on students from backgrounds that are under-represented in the legal profession. Her upcoming research agenda includes writing a chapter for a book on fostering law school success and inclusion for first generation law students.

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