<p>Law school exams seem quite mythical. I know that many law school classes only offer one graded assignment the entire semester, which is your final exam (no hw, no papers, no participation points, etc. ...nothing except that one exam!). The fact that it's curved and your grade/class rank/GPA results from them and also your job prospects can make it seem daunting.</p>
<p>What can you guys share about how to succeed on these almost mythical examinations?</p>
<p>They’re not all that mythical. You can probably google what they look like. Essentially they’re just a long story with some (usually) open ended question at the end. Unfortunately there really aren’t any silver bullets. As a general answer, you need to do 3 things:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Do your homework. All the reading, outlining (either making one or learning one), going to class, etc. Most everyone gets this part, though most people do it badly. It’s very easy in law school to focus your studying on the wrong things because you get absolutely no feedback.</p></li>
<li><p>Learn to write properly. Like the LSAT, the major constraint in law exams is usually time. Being able to quickly organize an answer gives you that much more time to write it. For example, my first ever law exam I wrote 27 pages in 3 hours. My friend who booked the class (won the award for best exam) wrote 35. Plus, good organizing makes it that much easier for your professor to pick out where you said the things that score points. Maybe half the class will learn to do this and actually be able to perform it during the exam. I’m pretty bad at this one but I have a lot of writing experience so my answers generally come out pretty clear in any case.</p></li>
<li><p>Learn your Professor. This is why things like “Law Preview” are so useless. Professors like to hear different things. By this I do not mean the undergrad “My professor is anti-abortion so I am too!” Rather, professors think certain kinds of arguments are better than others and you should use those kinds. My ConLaw professor cared a lot about structural arguments and not all that much about the other kinds. The top exam consisted of 75% structural arguments. This is the hardest thing to do because it requires you to both figure out what kind of argument style your professor prefers and apply it on the fly. Very few people manage to do this at all, fewer manage to do it consistently.</p></li>
<li><p>Luck. There’s usually a pretty easy way to distinguish between the A exams and the B+ exams. It’s nowhere near so clear where the A- line is. That may very well come down to how closely the professor is paying attention which could well be determined by how close to lunch your exam is graded. There’s also no way to account for the abilities of your classmates. Even if you nail 1,2, and 3, if everyone else does too you get a B.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In addition to the good advice from Demosthenes49 I’ll add be rested. Because of the sheer volume of material, it is easy to stay up all night studying, sometimes for days on end. Getting a reasonable amount of sleep helps tremendously with your ability to focus and compose your ideas.</p>
<p>More advice:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Open note exams are NOT the place to learn the material. You do not have time. I used long, long outlines (like, 80 pages long), but had a Table of Contents that I wrote the night before. Writing the TofC helped me to get the big picture and understand how all the material relates; having it meant that I could easily flip the page I wanted to.</p></li>
<li><p>My alma mater posted previous exams online. I used the ones that my professor had posted and studied them to figure out what would be tested. </p></li>
<li><p>STAY ON TIME. You can easily spend days writing the exam, but must do it in three or four hours. At the beginning of the test, divide your essays (and points) into your allotted time, and write the finishing time at the top of each essay (e.g. done with Essay 1 at 10 am, done with lower-point Essay 2 at 10:45 am, etc.). Then stick to it. </p></li>
<li><p>Triage. A lot of 1L exams are “issue spotters,” in which you are supposed to discuss all legal issues. (My Torts exam was two questions, each with a several-page long fact pattern, and the instruction to discuss all available causes of action and defences.) Yes, your professor wants you to spot as many issues as possible, but also wants you to be able to know which are the most viable claims, the strongest defences, and which claims are legitimate, but less important.</p></li>
<li><p>Pay attention to class handouts, class discussions, etc. One of my professors, who did mini-presentations as a break from the Socratic lecture (and to show how the law worked in context), tested those mini-presentations very heavily on the final. Another professor tested the material in hand-outs. </p></li>
<li><p>Before the actual exam, pick a question from a previously released final and do it in the allotted time, with the allowed materials. Put it away for a while, study, and then review it - see what issues you missed, what you did well, see how well you stayed on time.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think the key “secret” to law school exams is to recognize, before you start law school, how arbitrary they are. Yes, law students should study hard – but prospective law students should never make the mistake of assuming that they will go well even with extensive work and intellect. Even if you’re smart, and even if you study very hard, you still probably will not be in the top echelon of your class.</p>
<p>This is why you shouldn’t go to a law school that only places a minority of its class into jobs. This is why you shouldn’t go to law school planning to transfer. This is why you shouldn’t go into law school thinking that none of the statistics apply to you. Because you never really know how your exams are going to go.</p>
<p>I don’t think law exams are arbitrary. There are specific skills involved at which certain people are more proficient. That’s why the people with As tend to keep getting As with different professors. The problem is mostly that the specific skills required aren’t listed anywhere and they aren’t taught.</p>
<p>Demo,</p>
<p>You mentioned 27 pages. That’s incredibly long for a 3-hour exam. Was that in MS WORD single-spaced? I was thinking double-spaced, but figured I’d double-check with you. </p>
<p>I’ve taken an in-class Blue Book undergrad exam before. Probably did about 6 or 7 of those types throughout my UG career. I almost always did well. But obv. that was in a subject area that was my forte and not an actual law exam. </p>
<p>I’m also wondering if you write your law exams with a “Blue Book” style of presentation rather than a polished research paper that has perfect grammar, well placed transitional sentences, a carefully chosen rhetorical style, etc. …Is this more of a “messy” style of writing more similar to a short-answer section of an in-class exam? </p>
<p>I couldn’t imagine producing both volume and quality (of writing, not necessarily analysis) for in in-class three hour long exam (where speed may be a factor).</p>
<p>aries, </p>
<p>Was the 80-page outline self-written? You’re right. That sounds long!!! 
</p>
<p>How much of it did you end up using? How much time did you find yourself spending looking stuff up during the actual exam?</p>
<p>Also, how much time did you guys spend sketching your response before typing it? Or do some people sort of think/type as they go? </p>
<p>I guess I’m still trying to understand how a person can read several pages of exam passages, outline their response (or responses??..multiple essays?), and then crank out 25+ pages in under three hours! Sounds very daunting.</p>
<p>I think the longest Blue Book final I took was about 13-14 pages of hand-written response that was sloppily written (sort of in teh short answer form of response) under time pressure. I didn’t worry about grammar or presentation so much. But it was understood that that was the case for these in-class exams. I did do well on them, but that was in undergrad and for history and humanities type courses that I enjoyed and had a knack for.</p>
<p>jwinaz: I wrote all of my outlines myself, except for Property. (That class was legendary: we covered the entire textbook in one semester.) </p>
<p>During the actual exam, I would only look up one or two things; in an issue-spotter exam, I sometimes skimmed over my TofC to ensure that I caught every issue and didn’t space out on something. </p>
<p>My longest exam was probably about fifteen pages, but I usually wrote around 12 or 13 pages (1.5 spaced). It’s helpful to spend some time getting your thoughts in order so that you can write more efficiently and in a more cogent manner, but I spent about 3/4ths of my time writing. </p>
<p>Demo mentioned the LSAT as a time-crunched exam, but I found that law school exams were the most time-crunched tests I took, outside of engineering and high-level science courses in college. I felt like the LSAT made me hurry a bit at the end, or be conscious of my time throughout; law school exams are a three-hour sprint.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Double spaced. The point of the example was to illustrate the difference between my 27 pages and his 35 though. Single spaced or double, that’s a lot more writing and presumably a lot more points.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean by a “Blue Book” style. The Bluebook is a specific thing in law school and it’s almost certainly not what you mean. Law exams can be very messy, but as I mentioned earlier better organized exams look better and stand to score points on that basis alone. The A exams tend to be reasonably well organized and that is less true as you go down the grades.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think my longest outline ever was 30ish pages. I genuinely don’t know how people manage 80 page outlines. I use my outlines in only two scenarios on the exam: where I remember that I want to make an analogy to a case and I want to check to be sure its facts are what I recall, or where the exam throws a curveball like a question on something we only just touched on and I want to check what material I prepped just in case that happened. Otherwise, I mostly use the outline as a chance to order all the material in my head and create a general overview of the course.</p>
<p>Just to be clear, undergraduates often refer to blank booklets with blue covers as “blue books.” They are used in exams as the paper on which short-answer or essay questions can be answered.</p>
<p>Law journals have a specific citation method, which is outlined in a very detailed outline with a blue cover, referred to as “The Bluebook.” Law students do the work on law journals and therefore become very familiar with The Bluebook, which is sometimes verbed to become “bluebooking”: the practice of converting incorrectly formatted or punctuated citations into the proper form, as described in The Bluebook.</p>
<p>Demo: I have a (generally) excellent memory - my college nickname was “Rainman” - and I tended to remember almost everything that is in the most condensed version of my outlines. (If they were thirty pages, I would have twenty-nine pages of law stuffed into my brain. If they were eighty pages, I would have about seventy-eight or seventy-nine pages in my head.) </p>
<p>My outlines were also fact-heavy and explanation-heavy, which is helpful in exam time: “This case was predicated on this set of facts, for this reason, but does not apply here because…” </p>
<p>My outlines ended up getting passed around the school. Sometime during 3L year, someone came up to me and thanked me for them - “That was the only A I got during law school; I never went to class, but I read your outline five times before the final.”</p>
<p>Demos: Of course they’re not totally arbitrary. But (1) they’re arbitrary for most students except those few, and (2) which ones those “few” turn out to be will seem, if you try to predict in advance, arbitrary.</p>
<p>I’m curious, did none of you have the option of doing your exams on computers in law school?</p>
<p>The typewriter was considered a new invention when I went to law school, so no.</p>
<p>crankyoldman, I know what you mean. On my recent birthday, I said that I could not possibly be this old! I was more curious about some of the younger members who post here.</p>
<p>I took one exam via “a blue book”, and the rest online via computer.</p>
<p>I wrote out longhand EVERY WORD my professors said in law school and then transcribed it into an outline EVERY DAY. I also kept up with all the readings. Some folks like study groups, for me, they mostly just made me VERY nervous. I preferred to hang out with other grad students in different fields and found law students very stressed and stressful.</p>
<p>I agree that being well-rested and knowing the material and professor well was very important for doing well in exams. I didn’t type any of my exams, as typewriters were something else that could malfunction. If you write fairly legibily, it’s fine to write in longhand. There weren’t computers that we could use for exams, so it was longhand or a cumbersome typewriter.</p>
<p>After a while, it became clear to me that I was working as hard as I could for a B+ or having a good school/life balance for a B-; I ended up learning the material well and having a good school/life balance. I have no regrets.</p>
<p>I’m surprised, HImom, that you had the typewriter option for exams. I never heard of that back then! I think nowadays, those who have the option to do their exams on computers have a distinct advantage over those who choose to handwrite. I was just curious how many have that option. My D graduated two years ago and her school had the computer option for years prior to her starting 1L. Less than one percent of students when she was there chose not to use their laptop for exams.</p>
<p>I think that we had to write out a few exams (property, patent law, and criminal procedure all come to mind); the rest were typed. Well, I guess you could hand-write, if you wanted to be at a massive competitive disadvantage in a time-crunched test.</p>
<p>(Having done, and passed, bar exams both ways, I would <em>strongly</em> suggest typing them - even if you have to buy a new laptop for it.)</p>