The NCBE is a master at writing plausible-sounding MBE answer choices that are wrong. When you “know” an answer is correct, you don’t know it because it sounds right, you know it because you see through the words to the law they are expressing. When you don’t know the law, you’ll find yourself gravitating toward an answer that “sounds” better. When you catch yourself juggling two answers without a clear concept of what you are trying to apply, pick the one that sounds better and break it apart to see if you can find something wrong with it. In other words, look at it suspiciously and try to discern what it might be up to. Then look to see if you can find something right about the answer that sounds “weird.” You’ll find, more often than not (though not enough to make it a rule), that the weird one is right and the one that sounds good is wrong.
A follow-up to the “sounds right but is wrong” answer choice is the “Correctly Stated but Inapplicable Rule of Law.” This answer choice will be a perfectly written rule of law that is not applicable to the facts. If it came straight out of Black’s Law Dictionary, be sure it applies to the facts before you mark it.