Limited functionality – Themis Bar Review Review

This app is not as useful as it needs to be. The app lets you do two things, assuming you're signed up for the Themis bar review course: watch lectures and take the post-lecture assessment questions. That's it. The app does not include outlines, lecture handouts, or multistate bar exam (MBE) practice questions. You can use the app to watch videos offline if you download the videos while you are online. Although Themis does have MBE-like practice questions, they are not available in this app. The "hundreds of diagnostic assessment questions" are actually basic questions given after each video to check whether you've been listening to the lecture. They can't be accessed directly. Not that there would be any point in doing so—the assessment questions are useless for MBE preparation. The lack of MBE questions is a serious flaw, because the best use of a bar prep mobile app is for drilling on practice questions during moments of downtime while away from one's computer. Having lectures on a phone or iPad is less useful because you'll want to follow along in the lecture outline, which isn't in the app. I should note that if you do have an iPad, Themis makes the outlines available in the EPUB e-book format. So you can access the outline with iBooks, just not while you're using the Themis app. The app also has a few bugs or design issues. You can delete lecture videos, but the app shows no confirmation or evidence that a video has been deleted. I had to check the app's space usage in Settings > General > Usage to verify that videos had actually been removed. If you do use the app to watch videos, you will have to delete videos often because they use a lot of space. Videos can only be deleted one-by-one, which is cumbersome; there appears to be no way to delete all downloaded videos at once. I also had several problems with the app when the Themis web site was non-responsive. The app does not seem to handle unexpected events well. To make this app much more useful, I'd urge Themis first and foremost to make the MBE practice question bank available on the app. It would also be nice if Themis would (a) add the outlines and handouts, (b) make it possible to listen to the lecture while looking at the lecture handouts, and (c) add a way to delete all downloaded videos. Finally, there should be an audio-only option for the lectures. The static shot of a professor's head increases file size without adding anything useful.
Review by Tesla Bell on Themis Bar Review.