Exam Tips for 1L

JD@UVAUID: 3503603

Exam Tips for 1L

JD@UVAUID: 3503603

Professor: Students Should Take "Forks in the Road" on Law Exams

Law school exams are different from undergraduate exams because they focus on exploring ambiguities, not knowing the right answer, said law professor Roger Schechter on Friday at a lunch talk sponsored by the Student Bar Association and Bar/Bri.

Schechter, the William T. Fryer Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, offered tips to first-year law students on taking “issue-spotting” or “fact-pattern” law exams. In these exams, professors present a complicated hypothetical question and expect students to discuss potential legal outcomes, with the goal that students will reason through different possibilities.

“This is supposed to model something you’re going to see in the real world,” Schechter said. But “unless you specialize as a practitioner in representing clients who are tripping on acid, they will never have a fact pattern like the ones you will have on a law school exam.”

One of the most common mistakes students make on law school exams is spending too much time on the first question, Schechter said. He recommended that students read the last paragraph of the question first, which poses what the professor really wants to know.

“Knowing your role will orient your analysis of the task,” he said. Next, read the entire question as a story itself without taking notes.

On the third read, students should start dissecting the question into key facts and issues, which will allow them to track which issues they have addressed as they write answers. Schechter defined issues as pressure points or “the really interesting aspects of the problem that will dictate which way the problem will go.”

He cited the book “Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams,” for calling these pressure points “forks in the road” because the professor wants you to look at each path. Unlike in undergraduate exams, “your job is not to show off what you know about law,” he said. “Your goal is to walk down both forks in the road.”

The forks generally explore two alternative legal rules or two policy paradigms that apply to an issue. The conclusion to the question doesn’t really matter as much as the exploration of the two paths, he said, although students should make a conclusion about every issue that is raised.

If students think they see a clear answer in a question, they probably haven’t spotted the issue. There are no “right answers,” he said, but students can pick up clues about what the issue is by realizing every problem is carefully worded by the professor.

“If it says in the problem that someone speaks German, that’s probably there for a reason,” he said.

Although students are tested on their ability to reason through a hypothetical case, “you have to know the law,” Schechter said. Many students do this through creating course outlines, a practice he urged students not to “fetishize.”

“It’s not about the outline,” he said, and urged students to learn information the same way they did as undergraduates.

After students have completed most of their studying, they should create “nested checklists” by writing down 10 to 16 bullet points covering the major topics of the course on one sheet of paper. From there, students should write down three to six bullet points on one sheet of paper for each of the major topics. This helps students recall the information they have studied in a way that will be useful on a fact-pattern test.

Finally, he urged students not to discuss exams with their classmates after the fact. “There is no profit, there is only misery that way.”

JD@UVAUID: 3503603

Professor A:
Spend at least of third of your time for each question reading the question, jotting notes and planning your answer before beginning to write.

Professor B:
With the caveat that everyone is different, and no advice is right for everyone, here are two bits of great advice (on basics) that a wise person told me during my first law school exams:

Treat yourself right. Get sleep, get exercise, eat well, call your friends and family. It’s a bad idea, and usually self-defeating anyway, to do things like stay up all night, drop exercise, or wall yourself off from everyone you otherwise interact with.

For those taking fixed exams, resist the temptation to stand around with those who have all just taken the same exam and discuss how you answered questions. I violated this rule on my first law school exam. After that conversation, I felt physically ill because I convinced myself I flunked the exam because I “missed” something major. Turns out it was my best grade of the semester, but it took some (not-so-fun) weeks to learn that.

Professor C:
1. Spend a LOT of time outlining your answer before you start writing. As a rule, I made myself spend one-third of the exam time outlining before I would let myself start writing. The best answers are ones that read coherently from start to finish. Typing a lot of text isn’t very helpful if you figure out half-way through your answer that you’re going in the wrong direction.

2. Exams are endurance contests, not memory contests. Prepare accordingly. On a daily basis, you need your first hour of physical exercise and your eighth hour of sleep a lot more than you need your tenth hour of studying.

Professor D:
The exam advice I give students every year is — don't forget your audience and purpose — unlike predictive memo writing for law firms or other legal employers, you are now writing for a reader well-versed in the area of law you are discussing, and the purpose of an exam is not to inform the reader of the state of the law in a particular area, but rather, to show the professor you have processed his or her lectures.  

I also tell my students to take study breaks to allow their minds to process the information they are studying and make connections and see patterns, rather than constantly "inputting" more information.

Finally, practice exams are friends.      

Professor E:
1. Identify and discuss all relevant issues that are fairly raised by the facts, exercising judgment as to how much to discuss each issue in light of its importance and complexity.

2. Demonstrate a sound understanding and use of the laws, doctrines and principles that are relevant to analyzing the issues.

3. Engage in effective analysis, i.e., articulate in clear and precise terms the arguments and counterarguments regarding how the law should apply to the facts presented.  Strong answers go beyond basic points to discuss more subtle or sophisticated arguments.

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A few professors talked about exams:

On preparing for the exam

"Even in an open-book exam, I would recommend getting yourself down to a cheat sheet or two," Goluboff said. Distilling information from a long outline "is a way to make you more facile with it." She advises her students to identify the themes of the course and figure out which cases relate to those themes. "It's a good thing to do practice exams."

Choi agreed that coming up with a shorter cheat sheet, when allowed, offered students the best kind of preparation. He suggested a two- to three-page summary listing the issues, and the relevant statute provisions, UCC statements or articles, and cases. "Given that you already have all that knowledge in your head, it will allow you to make those connections in writing your essay much faster," he said.

Abraham said he advises students to get in a study group from the beginning of the semester and talk about the issues. "If you haven't done that in the course of the semester, you're at a big disadvantage and it's hard to do anything to make up for that disadvantage in two days of studying," he said.

How students can do better during the test

"Read the questions really carefully," Goluboff said. "One of the things that I find really frustrating when grading exams is when the students misunderstand the nature of the question.

"Something that trips up a lot of people is, in the anxiety and the time pressure of taking the test, not spending enough time seeing what is this question asking you to do, what kind of an answer does the question require, and what does that look like," she said. Students should "know whether the question is asking you doctrine or asking you to think at a higher level. And then answer accordingly."

Choi also suggested a careful process for tackling issue-spotting questions.

"I think it is really important to not rush into things — you have to organize your thoughts and come up with a master plan before you start writing," he said. He suggested students read fact-pattern questions carefully, and then "think of a plan of attack." After about five to 10 minutes of preparation, start writing and unpacking each issue in full force. "Finally, after you have written and gone through all those issues, you want to do some mop-up operation." That entails organizing or rearranging your paragraphs, and rewriting or adding some writing where necessary to make sure your answer represents everything you want to say.

What you should avoid doing during the test

Goluboff said it was critical not to leave any blank answers. "When it's clear that someone has run out of time and they've written me a paragraph that gives me, in broad strokes, their understanding of the question, and it's clear that they understand it, that [student] is in a very different position than someone who didn't answer the question at all," she said. "Even if they've only spent five or 10 minutes giving me those broad brushstrokes, they're worth a lot. … Showing me that they knew the answer is very important."

"Don't stress out too much," Choi advised. "If you get stressed out, you perform less well, so you have to try to go into the exam with a relaxed attitude so your brain can function much faster." At the exam, sometimes it helps to keep things in perspective: "Even if you get a bad grade, that's not the end of the world. Years from now, you won't even care what you received in a first-year, first-semester course."

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Law School Exam Tips, with Professor Anne Coughlin (2011)

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Lessons from my freshman year: don't stare at the blondes during the final.

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XUANIE的经验就是放交响乐:lol:lol