Exam Tips 3: What you should get out of practice exams

This is not advice. And the reason it's not advice will be very clear to anyone who goes to the meta-blog that Ambivalent Imbroglio has just set up, called Blawg Wisdom, which compiles discussions of how people approached law school and what they did during law school. Lots of people there give advice on anything you can imagine -- transferring, reading cases, and so forth.

If you read it, you'll find some conflicting points of view. "Hand-write your notes." "Type everything in the computer." "Don't talk unless you're called on." "Talk as much as you feel like." "Law school is just school, about law." "Law school is like nothing you've ever done before." "Outline early." "Wait until the semester is almost over to start outlining." "Don't outline at all." What this should teach you -- and this is the only piece of actual advice here -- is that many many people have successfully approached law school in a large number of ways. Trust yourself. If you've never learned well by working in groups, don't join a study group. If you learn best by discussing with other people, do that. Know what you want, and do what you have to to get it. Because ultimately, even the people who write big expensive books that charge lots of money are not really giving advice. They're just saying, "hey, this worked for me!" Hopefully you'll learn to trust yourself. And next year, maybe you'll be able to say "Hey, this worked for me!" too.

So if it's not advice, why bother doing it? Because law school is, no matter whether you find it that way or not, hyped up to be a scary arbitrary random frightening tiring experience. Potential misery loves anecdote. So read away, and realize that for some people, law school is fun. Maybe it'll be fun for you, too. Drop the fear, and remember that your professors are not trying to kill you.

This is the final entry in my not-advice series, and I must finish it today, before I leave this town. I also have to pack. So the disclaimer is light: even if this sounds like advice, it is not advice. Got it?

Exam Tips 3: What to get out of practice exams

So, if you've paid attention through this whole thing, you'll remember that I finish my outlines within hours of the class being finished. This means that I essentially have the entire exam period to focus on honing my exam-taking skills. And to goof off.

Let me emphasize the goofing off part for a little bit. The last thing you want to do, and by you, I mean me, is walk into an exam feeling burned out. You will not perform at your peak. You will miss issues. You will get bored while writing your exam, and your exam will not be particularly interesting to read. This is Not a Good Thing. So, for me, the worst time of the semester is about two weeks before classes end, when I'm pushing to understand the last few concepts and finish my outlines. After classes end, I take an afternoon off and do little to nothing, and then work for maybe three to five hours a day thereafter. More if I meet with people. This goofing off period, for me, is vital to enjoying what I do.

Now, if my outline is finished, what am I spending my time doing? The answer is: practice exams, practice exams, and more practice exams. Ideally what you want is exams written by your professor, with sample answers, also written by your professor (remember that even a student who does very very well on the exam will miss some interesting and important points). In fact, ideally you want a practice exam, a sample perfect answer, a sample "B" answer, and a sample "C" answer. The reason is that you want to do negative hypothesis testing: if you say "this exam is superlative because it does X" you want to make sure that the "C" exam is not also doing X. I have never gotten anything other than sample perfect exams from professors, though.

The first time you take an exam -- the very very first -- you need to time yourself, but don't hold yourself strictly to the time guidelines. That is: know how much time you took, and how much time you should have taken, but take all the time you need to make your answer as good as possible. Within reason, of course; you shouldn't spend days on it.

Now take your exam, and compare it with the sample answer. If you don't have a sample answer, get together with your friends and talk about the answers you got. You're looking for two things here. First, you're looking for things you didn't see. Mark down the things you didn't see with a pen on a separate piece of paper; we'll come back to that. Second, you're looking for organization. Ask yourself: How could I have organized this better? What could I do to make this appear more logically?

Okay. Now you've taken your first practice exam. What you should have at this point is a diagnostic. You know what you're missing, and you know what the problems are with your organization. You also know how long you take to write an issue. Now you need to work on all these things.

First, how do you start getting the things you were missing? You'll find that you have some systematic errors, like not noticing potential illusory promises or forgetting about contributory negligence. You'll also notice that some of your friends are particularly good at seeing ways of resolving a particular kind of conflict. What you need to do is convert these missed issues into questions where, if you asked yourself that question, you would get the answer. Thus: "Is there any way that this person could escape this contract?" might highlight a particular illusory promise issue, or "What best preserves the rights of the non-breaching party?" Take this list of questions, and after you read the fact pattern and before you start writing, ask yourself those questions. If you systematically force yourself to ask questions about things you typically miss, you will train yourself to get them.

How do you fix organization? Practice and redos. After you take that first exam, tear the organization apart. Figure out how you could have best organized it -- how you could have spent less time on this important issue and more time on this less important issue, how you should have talked about this next to this next to this -- and come up with an effective organizational scheme for that exam. Now, rewrite the exam -- yes, rewrite it! -- using that organizational scheme. You must teach yourself to write the right way, the first time. The only way I know to do that, at least for me, is to reinforce the feeling of "organizing right" in my head.

And finally, how do you fix time problems? You learn to be organically connected with the clock on your computer as you write. You must learn exactly how long it takes to write a certain issue -- to within thirty seconds -- and be able, once you have drafted out what you're going to say, to roughly allocate time and finish your answer exactly within the allotted times. After the first practice exam, stick to your time limits. If the question says "thirty minutes", take thirty minutes. Stick to your internal time limits as well. If the question says thirty minutes and it raises two major points, each of which is approximately as important as the other, spend fifteen minutes on each of those points. Period. Some slight variation is allowed, but err on the side of less time rather than more. Time is not your friend in exams.

In addition to knowing your clock, you must also learn to write quickly, without great pauses for thought. And you must do so intelligently. It's nice to write in complete sentences. The easiest way to do this, by far, is to write simple sentences with words that you normally use. The best thing I did, first year, as far as getting myself to write quick uninhibited prose was to keep a blog. And my exams pretty much were written in the same style as my blog posts -- I write quickly, I glance once-over, and that's it. It's not always perfect, but that's okay.

On the other hand, you do not want to write as if you are semi-literate, even if that would be faster for you. Your professor may say that he or she does not take off for misspelled grammatically twisted sentences. But if your professor has to read your sentence two or three times just to figure out what the heck you meant -- and if your professor than has to read the previous sentence to see where the heck you're going -- and if your professor has to read a hundred exams and twenty pages each . . . . I'm sure you see where this is going. You're not going to get credit for a concept your professor doesn't see. If it's actually head-achingly painful to read your prose, your professor just might not see everything you said. Write simply. Write quickly. And write with some semblance of grace and style.

While we're on this subject, I should mention a Very Bad Habit of mine, which is to make sly, sometimes sarcastic, asides. Never more than one or two per exam (although there are far more in my practice exams -- if I didn't make those snide comments, I'd get seriously bored doing practice exams). Really, they just slip out. But like I said, I'd get bored if I didn't do them during practices, I'd get bored, and what I practice, I end up doing in the real thing. So far as I can tell, it has never hurt me. So: don't try to be funny during an exam, or snide, or crack jokes; there's no reason to waste brain power on something that gets you no points. But do be comfortable; any delegitimizing effect that might accrue when you tongue-in-cheek point out that "rational basis" and "president" may not belong in the same sentence will be balanced by your increased comfort level. If you write comfortably, as you would on a blog, you'll be writing at the right level. Informal but passably written is far superior -- at least in terms of time management and ease of reading -- than stilted prose with big words.

Do this over and over again. You have not practiced enough if your time allocation is awry. Time must, must, must come out right (but look on the bright side: once you learn that skill, you'll have it for all your classes, for ever more. The first semester of exams will be the hardest, because you'll have to learn time allocation). You will not ever get all the issues. Sorry. You will not even get all the issues that you know that you systematically miss. So you just have to do your best and try and get more every time you practice.

Most importantly, write comfortably and have fun. If you enjoy writing your exam, it's more likely that your professor will enjoy reading it. That's a win-win situation for everyone.

And that's it!

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Posted by Heidi at August 6, 2004 01:15 PM | TrackBack