f13.net

I have my first exams in Property, Civ Pro, and Contracts on the 7th, 10th and 12th of January respectively.  I will be studying continuously for the next four days to prep for Property, after havinig done no studying for it over Christmas but having gone to class and taken notes better than most during the semester.  

Anyone have any general exam tips?  Its always hard to tell from the model answer what kind of answers they like- did IRAC seem to work for you guys to do well?  I also go to a school where I have the feeling Glannons rule recital won't be good enough- if any of you went to a law school heavy on the theory, did writing down a bunch of wacky philosophical bullshit on your exams seem to help or hurt?  Thanks!

Uh, couldn't Ganon breath fire or some shit?  I mean, why do you need to be a lawyer if you can breath fire, you should have a small kingdom of evil being thwarted by a 4 foot dude w/ a sword and shield.

Oh wait, I get it, a lawyer that can breath fire, brilliant!

Edit: Apology for irrelevance.

Shit, my empire could've been saved if I had the power to remove one ladder or block just one doorway on the entire continent.  But oppressing 15 people is hard work.

I'm not a lawyer but I did go to university.   The only piece of advice I'm qualified to give you, however, is don't get stoned before your exam. :(

I went to a theory-heavy school.  In my experience, you still need to lay the foundation with issue spotting and the application of blackletter law, especially in a first-year exam.  Once you have done that, you have your B- or B or whatever the base curve is at your school. Then you go about liberally spreading some theory over those legal principles to move your grade up beyond that point.

For first year exams, I'm pretty sure they will expect some IRAC/CRAC kind of format.  Can't really go slinging around theory without the foundation laid first....of course, this doesn't stop some people, but better to be safe than get a C, IMO.

Hell, any essay exam where issue spotting is important should trigger the IRAC format for all 3 years of school.

Well, the first thing to do is know the law and get it right.  The hard thing about law school exams is distilling the legal rules from the cases you've studied, and recognizing the applications of those rules when the facts you're dealing with are substantially different from the facts in the cases.

If your professor provides old exams, go over those with utmost care, so you know what to expect.  

Otherwise, do your best. Studying hard is a good idea, but unlike college, it's not sufficient to get you to the top.

Well said.

I used IRAC at the beginning. It was a good way to keep myself organized when taking exams. Later on, you'll develop you're own style of writing but for now its good enough.

I would not go sprouting some philosophical bullshit in your answer, it makes it look like you haven't studied. You've got to know your cases and law. You want a cold application of the law to the facts of the case before you, sprinking this with references to cases you have gone over in class. Then add your BS. heh.

Since you said you take a lot of notes, what worked for me was to keep rewriting and distilling my notes until I basically had the whole year of class on a double sided 8x11 sheet.

The answer is always the Rule Against Perpetuties.

Sorry. Similar to what others have said, my advise is to know the subject matter first, worry about answer format second. Being able to identify the issues is the main chore then I would barf out an IRAC. First year classes are all about he foundations, so show you have mastered those instead of going off on some tangent. You can expand on theory in your argument section if you want, but you will make most of your grade in the IR part.

Yeah, that's good advice.  The only thing that is throwing me is that in my Property Class, all his exams are VERY policy-oriented- one question from his 2002 exam was "Life is unfair- relate this to property" and also "Some people don't like eminent domain.  What do you think of it and how would you change it?"  The people who got the best grades in his class last year were the people who never went to class and on the exam just proposed crazy shit like mandating pre-nups and totally banning zoning (supposedly, according to pervasive rumor)- I guess I just have to keep my exam interesting.

heh. I remember at BarBri, the instructor just told us to just guess at any questions dealing with RAP. If you didn't understand it in school, there was no way you'd understand it in bar review and it would be a waste of time to even try.

Graduated in 1998, never undertood it and have never seen it again.

Something about 21 years and a life in being, right?




Those are some wierd as shit questions for prop I.

 Just remember, if you screw up your first year, you're career is essentially fucked as no one will hire you as a summer associate.

No pressure.




Seriously, good luck on your exams.

Heh, thanks.  And I really don't feel pressure.  All 3 of our professors told us multiple times that we could be the anchorman and still get (except for the SCOTUS clerkship) any job we want.  But nobody believes them since we are all scary and insane.

Did you make an outline or obtain an outline of each course?  In either case, each class has a limited number of main topics.  If you ensure that you have covered every main topic at some point during your exam and referred to as many of the subtopics as possible, you will pass.  

I was known as the master of the B minus as Baylor Law only has A, A-, B, B-, C, D and F.  The school graded on a strict curve so that only 5 would get an A, 10 an A-, 17 B, 25 B-, etc.  Once I realized that I wasn't going to be one of the chosen/psycho students who lived in the library and memorized case names, I memorized the outlines.  

If you get the end of your Civ Pro exam and you haven't discussed supplemental jurisdiction, you better go find it because it is on their somewhere.  Likewise, you know Crim Pro will have a question regarding the mens rea of murder and manslaughter.  

If your prof is going to throw out policy questions, you are on your own and no studying is going to help.  On those, you have the choice of answering how you feel or answering how you think your professor feels.  In either case, you better support it with something.  

Oh, yeah.  You have no clue how miserable these exams will be until after you finish and have to wait a month or so for a grade.  You and your friends are going to have completely different answers to the same questions because there are so many available points and no one actually scores more than 50 percent of the points available.  So, discussing the exam with classmates is an exercise in futility and a good way to ruin your mood.  

P.S.  Do you know what they call the person with the lowest passing score on the bar exam?

So what was the final word about getting stoned before the exam?

As long as you study, know the material, and then take the test - you will do fine.  Most don't care the format you put it in, just make it legible and logical.  I would also recomend staying away from other law students right before exams and don't talk/speculate about the correct answers after the tests (they don't know any more than you, there are tons of ways to answer most questions, most of the ones with the biggest egos/and all the "right" answers will take a big hit when they get their grades).   Good luck!

And if all else fails, just put a crisp, new $100 bill on each page of your bluebook.  


It can't hurt.

Update:  Just looked at model property answer for the three hour in-class test with four questions.  Twenty-one pages long.  TWENTY ONE!!!!  It looked like the jackass just prepared an essay on how he would change every single property related system (Eminent domain, zoning, adverse possessoin, etc.) and cut and pasted it in.  And indeed, as we found out in an email today, you ARE allowed to prewrite and cut and paste.  I have one day to prepare.

That makes any test easy. In any class. For anything.


If you aren't an idiot.

Edit: But, you are in law school, so I don't think idiot is your style.

PREWRITE?????  WTF???

That would make any exam merely a matter of not sleeping for the entire day before and crafting all of your arguments with some blanks for the fact analysis.  

Good grief.  Just have a paragraph for every possible main topic in the course.  You will have all of the elements already in your text.  Man, that sure seems like cheating.  

Pressure is having to remember all of the elements while scratching away at a blue book and using your scratch paper to outline your answer.  

Damn kids these days have it easy.

Remember, you are still (presumably) graded on a curve, so doing well doesn't get you anything; doing better than your classmates does.  So this gift from your professor may not turn out to be such a gift after all.

What are the logistics of "pre-writting" an exam?  Do you do them on computers?  Couldn't you just take in your whole outline on it then?

/confused

Update on the prewriting saga.

Sat down.  Finished 50% of the exam in 20 minutes because I had almost perfectly prewritten.  Felt dirty.  Spent the next 2 hrs on areas of course where I hadn't done the reading, but since I had hte time I did what I needed right there.  Come out, and everyone is laughing and high fiving each other- some were prescient enough to prewrite all four questions.  God, I love law school.

Grats, now go get drunk.  Scotch or gin, so you can pretend to be a real lawyer :)  Then get up and start cracking those Civ Pro outlines.

Next time he should just give you the answer and grade you on how well you copy it.
 
Heh, good for you though, sounds like you did well.

Still confused as to how this actually works. Why bother to even have an exam if you can walk in with everything to answer it already done?

Because he's an 80 year old man who has been teaching property law since 1955.  And he's Southern.  When you are that age and from the South, you get to do what you want.  These were all policy questions, which is why this was possible...last ight I prepared a four page essay on the Rule Against Perpetuities (and my proposed hybrid trust system) and another one on Expansion of Property Rights (bad! says me).  I hit paydirt as those were two of the questions, but I didn't prewrite the others....

I'm really just asking how this is done.  Do you do you test on a computer and have the answer stored in there or on a disk? Do you take in a written answer with blanks in it?  I'm talking logistics, not whether it is a good idea.

We were allowed to bring ANYTHING we wanted from class, and we take the exam on our laptop.  Thus, I just opened by attendant Word files and pasted.  And all the questoins were like "Some feel that the current trust system is bad for X, Y and Z.  Do you agree and how would you change it?" so it was easy to prewrite.

Now I just wish I knew what he expected y'all to learn from a policy exam first year.

My school was much more on the practical side of things, and it was great when I got to the bar exam and had heard of most of that obscure crap before.

I'm also jealous that your laptop exams allow you to (apparently) just use MS Word.  We had this program called ExamSoft that basically locked you out of your machine, except for your blank document answer.  Hell, people got all upset when they found out that nobody had disabled spell check.  Because, you know, spelling well means so much regardless of whether you studied.

Christ, I got a blue book and had to bring my own pencil.

/old

Don't worry Ab, most people wrote their exams at my school.

Some of us used our laptops or the computer labs.  But the vast majority had the bluebook & pencil/pen thing going on.

haha yep me too and I only graduated in '98

Update on finally getting grades:

A- in Contracts, A- in Civ Pro, B in Property.  Thanks for the help...it was nice to hear from older and cooler heads than the hysteria of other students.  This puts me at about the 55th percentile for my class, and at my particular LS that is something I am very satisfied with.  Thanks again!

Congrats.

They must have big grade inflation at Harvard if at 3.46 puts you at 55th percentile.  I was Order of the Coif with a 3.4. I think the #1 person in my class had just over a 3.5.

The fairly reliable scuttlebutt is that there is a tight curve, with the middle grade being between B/B+ (tending toward B+).  Its roughly 10% A, 20% A-, 30% B+, 30% B, 10% B-, with Cs and below reserved for turning in blank exams and/or being really coked up.  So yeah, unlike most schools C and below isn't in the picture.

Interesting.  At mine As were really, really rare when I was in school. Nowhere near 10%, more like 2%, and Cs were very likely if you slacked off. Could be because of the larger class size (I think Harvard is like 6xs that of where I went) so they need greater distribution. I do know it wasn't that regimented.  Class rank is all that matters anyways. Keep up the good work.

While I have the attention of the law people....

Generally, what does it take to get into a good law school, if I had a MA in History, and possibly a JD?

I'm still in undergrad, but Law school is something I am considering for the somewhat-distant future.

If you already have a JD, then you'd be going for an LL.M. or JSD.

But basically, destroy the LSAT, have good undergrad grades, and some solid references, and you should be fine for getting into a good school.

Also realize that the U.S. News rankings aren't the final arbiter of "good" and a lower tier school could teach you just as much if not more than a higher tier school.  Case in point are the people I have worked with who went to theory-intensive schools.  Lots of these kids came to me to ask how to do basic attorney tasks, largely because nobody ever told them how to do 'em.

At the same time, if you want to hear someone describe the origins of "free speech" jurisprudence in excruciating detail, for an entire semester, then the heavy theory schools are for you.

I agree with everything CmdrSlack said.

The law school admissions program is almost entirely numbers dependent based upon GPA and LSAT.   If you are really considering it, go talk to some lawyers in the geographical area you think you will practice in to get a sense of a) whether it is a good idea and b) where to go.

Almost every law school will deny it but the ones in Texas all use some varient of 10 X GPA plus LSAT score to come up with a scale for admitting someone.  As most GPA's are pretty well set by the time you consider applying, the only dramatic change that is availalbe is in maximizing the LSAT score.  

Make sure you read 1L by Scott Turow before applying to law school.  Too many people get to the first week of class and then quit because they like the idea of being a lawyer but not the process of becoming one.

Higher institutions always grade higher.

The harder a school is to get into, the easier it is to *stay* in and avoid low grades. At  a place like Harvard, only 2% or so of undergrads have to drop out,  and the average GPA is something absurd like A-.

If you go to a mid to low tier school, you often find failure rates in the 20s-30s.