Final Exams: A Second Look

First off, a bit of housekeeping. As Perry noted, we've been a little too busy to commit to our planned one-post-per-week regimen. Additionally, another problem I've encountered personally that I think our friend may have also run into is the fact that - and this is shocking, I know - not every moment of law school is full of something new and exciting worth writing about. After the initial shock of the first few weeks, I found that I settled into the steady groove of routine, just as I did in undergraduate school. Let this be a comfort (or a warning) to the aspiring law student.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I would bother writing a follow-up post about exams after Mr. Mason has done such a fine job himself. Simply put, after talking to him and reading his post, I have noticed that there were some major key differences in our respective schools' practices in giving exams that I wanted to touch on to give a fuller picture of what your exam period might look like.

Like Perry, my Thanksgiving was weighed down with the dread of the upcoming final exams. One of my professors had quite helpfully given a non-graded practice midterm (apparently it is a tradition at my school for one of the 1L professors for each section to do this) that we went over during a review session. This gave me a sense of what taking a law school exam is like and how it differs from a regular undergraduate exam (and, if you're like me and really didn't have any exams in your last year of college, put me back in the test-taking mindset). This should help underscore the real value of taking practice exams. As Perry said, many professors' past exams are available through the library - at my school, they actually post them online in PDF form. If your professor doesn't have any available - my civil procedure professor, for example, didn't have any up because this was his first or second year teaching the court - ask your professor which exams he or she would recommend you take for practice. They will be able to point you to other professor's with similar style. But enough has been said about that in Perry's post. I would like to reinforce one point he made - if you don't feel like going through the whole process of sitting down and timing yourself as you actually take an exam at least go through the fact pattern and issue spot. Also try to organize an answer if you can, even if you don't write it. The key thing that professors will look at in grading is 1) whether you hit all of the topics they wanted you to cover in your response and 2) whether it's organized. While many of my professors said that organization wouldn't affect the overall grade too much, the simple fact is that if they can't follow your argument, they won't know what you were trying to say.

Enough about general exam advice. Now I'm going to touch on some differences between Perry's exams and mine. There are three main topics I will cover: outlines, computer exams, and question types.

#1: Outlines
Unlike Perry, I was actually able to bring my outlines and casebooks into most of my exams. The one exception was civil procedure, and even then we were allowed to bring our federal rulebooks into the exam and could write whatever we wanted in them (the publishers, quite handily, gave about 12 blank pages in the back of the book into which I was able to squeeze a hyper-condensed version of my outline). Whether or not you are given this luxury will affect your studying strategy. For instance, I probably spent a bit less time on "attack sheets" than Perry and more on familiarizing myself with my outline structure. Some of my outlines were massive - my criminal law outline was 58 pages, for reasons I will discuss shortly. Therefore, it was imperative that I not have to waste time shuffling around trying to find that one case or the elements of such and such crime. If you find yourself in this situation, here's a few of things you might consider:

• Read over your outline. Again, and again, and again. Repetition can help you remember where exactly everything in your outline is located. This also helps reinforce the main benefit of the outline - a great deal of studying can be accomplished simply by making the outline because it forces you to go over the material all at once, which helps both in remembering some of the older material and synthesizing the whole course.
• Table of contents/index. The main idea here should be obvious. However, I actually wouldn't recommend this option very much since it doesn't really solve the problem of shuffling through your outline.
• Tabbing. This was my main strategy. To help pinpoint me in the right direction, I put tabs in my outline at the beginning of each topic in the class and wrote on the tabs which subject they corresponded with. That way I was able to read the essay prompt, identify the issues, and flip right to the section I needed, and go from there. This cut down a lot of time on my essays and was probably the most useful tool I had at my disposal.

Another potential variable is your professor's particular style, which is why, when taking practice exams, you use your own professor's past exams or those of professors with similar exams. Take my criminal law class, which resulted in a 58 page outline. By contrast, my property outline was 40 pages, and my civil procedure outline only 26. What gives? It has to do with exam style. My criminal law professor likes facts analogies to other cases and he helped write out textbook. This led me to go more into detail about the set up for each of the main cases and to include minor cases raised in the Notes and Questions sections. Most professors don't care, or even know themselves, what's in the notes for other people's books, but they sure remember them from their own. The property exam was a bit shorter because that professor only really highlighted the main cases and, for her questions, crafted a fictional state to help us avoid getting bogged down in jurisdictional questions, so I was more able to focus on doctrinal questions on that outline. However, she was very visual as well, so I ended up pasting a lot of screen-shots of charts and graphs from my class notes (like Perry, I use OneNote) to augment the main points. Finally, for civil procedure, the fact that we did were limited to our rulebooks really guided my outline structure. The main outline itself was only 26 pages, as I mentioned, and I from there halved it to fit in the 12 pages at the end of the rulebook. There were some subject-specific reasons for this as well - in civil procedure cases, the facts matter much less than the procedural question, though you can use facts to help identify the case. Still, my main goal was economy and creating memory triggers. In this respect, my civil procedure outline probably mirrored Perry's the most.

#2: Computer Exams
This isn't so much a difference from Perry, as I believe he was in the same boat as me in this respect, but it is something to be aware of. Probably the second greatest difference between law school exams and undergrad exams, aside from the IRAC style and the issue-spotting focus on the questions themselves, is the ability to take exams on computers. As with note-taking, computer use in exams is optional and you should decide early whether it's right for you. Before you download the software (which, while distributed for free through your law school, can be a bit invasive), or if your school does not provide a practice exam template, try taking an exam with a word processor. For me, I preferred this style of exam-taking, because I tend to type faster and think on my feet better with a keyboard than a pencil and paper, largely due to the ability to cut and paste and go back to flesh out earlier ideas. I also noticed that it considerably reduced the strain on my hand. Plus, when writing under timed conditions like that, my handwriting tends to degenerate over time, which can be detrimental during the grading process. If you're the opposite from me in any of these ways, consider using the traditional bluebook method.

#3: Question Types
I encountered three distinct types during my exams. They are as follows:

1. IRAC issue-spotting. The bread and butter of law school exams. Most exams will be comprised solely of these. The formula is simple, even if tricky to master - read the fact patter, identify the issues, organize a response, and write. Often you will be asked to role-play, usually as an attorney advising a client. However, sometimes the professor may give you a break - one of the essay questions I faced placed me in the role of a judge and asked how I would rule on the motions presented in the fact pattern, which effectively identified the issues for me.
2. Policy essay. Probably a fairly rare breed, but worth being aware of. In one of my classes, we spent a fair amount of class time talking about overarching policy goals. The second essay on that exam (worth considerably less in terms of points that the traditional issue-spotting essay) asked us to write an opinion about a hypothetical policy move in light of several of the topics we discussed during the semester. This was more like an undergraduate essay exam question, so if you encounter this, it may feel a bit more familiar than the more legalistic form of the issue-spotting essay.
3. Multiple choice. Needs no introduction - you have a scantron, you bubble in the right answer. These are often a bit more tricky than undergrad multiple choice questions, since many of the options will be "right," but one will be the most correct. As a variation on this, however, I did have one section of multiple choice mixed with short answers. Rather than bubble in a scantron, I had to write the answer into the exam software and cite the legal rule I used to justify my response. This gives you the chance to score some partial credit if you don't pick the absolute correct answer as long as you're reasoning is sound.

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Hopefully, between Perry's post and mine, you will be prepared for any kind of law school exam that comes your way. If I had to boil down our posts into one key sentence, though, it would be this: Make a good outline for your class and focus on being able to issue-spot, preferably by taking practice exams.

And now, because I have no classes that last all year, I bid adieu to civil procedure, property, criminal law, and legal writing and research. A new set of challenges await me as I enter torts, contracts, constitutional law, employment discrimination, and moot court. Hopefully, a new semester will bring new experiences and, with them, new posts. As this will probably be the last post before the new year, let me wish all of our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2011.

~PAX