All You Ever Wanted To Know About Law School Exams

In recognition of the month of December and the upcoming exam period, here is a gift:

All You Ever Wanted To Know About Law School Exams

This comes from everyone's favourite legal tabloid, Above The Law.

If you click on the link you will see an "Anonymous Law Professor's" musings on that rite of passage for law students everywhere... the final exam.

I thought this was one of the best pieces of advice he/she gave:

What are the biggest mistakes students make?

Other than not knowing the rules, or ignoring obviously stand-out items in fact-patterns? Wasting time. Time is the exam-taker’s most valuable commodity. If a student doesn’t know the answer to a certain question, or doesn’t know what to make of a fact, that student should move on to the next question. Making up a story or new rules, or tortuously applying a rule, gets a student nowhere. The time could have been used to fully flesh out a correct answer on the next question. Cracking jokes may amuse me (not usually for content, but for attempt), but it never gets points.

Another fatal and common error involves not reading and answering the question asked. If the exam asks what are the defendant’s strongest defenses to negligence, the exam is trying to help you. With that narrower prompt, I am asking you to narrow your response to only concern the defendant. Don’t tell me about the plaintiff! You are wasting time and I won’t give you points.

I can speak from experience that it is extremely important to take a moment to read the entire exam to know exactly what is expected. This lesson was embedded in my mind late one December afternoon when, with 5 minutes remaining in my Torts exam, I realized there was a 4th negligence essay question for which I hadn't budgeted any time. That was not fun.

So, best of luck in your upcoming exams. Study hard, outline specifically for the exam and subject itself (don't just outline the same way for each exam/subject), read the questions carefully and always, ALWAYS know exactly how many questions you have to answer.

RW