Student Blogs: 1st Year

Midterm Exams come in early October and will occur in at least one of your classes. The six, or so, weeks from day one to exam day seem like forever in August, but the night before your exam you’ll be thinking “Holy expletive, that was fast.” I had what I consider to be three midterms; the one mandatory midterm in my Property class, one professor elected midterm in my Torts class, and a paper due in my Legal Methods class which came at the same time as midterms and was just as hard.

Midterms are your first real challenge in law school. If orientation is riding with training wheels and if the first five weeks of the semester is the wobbly post-training wheels period, then the midterms are like riding a bike race without using your hands. It’s tough because during the time leading up to midterms you are sprinting in the dark. You know you are moving, but you can’t tell whether you are heading in the right direction or where the finish line is. You fumble in the darkness, desperate for guidance, hoping the hours you are spending will bear fruit. You’ve never studied for a law exam, you’ve never taken a law school exam and, for that matter, you’ve never even seen a law exam.

Rather than go through the experience chronologically freak out moment by freak out moment, I’ll just tell you what I learned worked and didn’t work and some other useful-ish information.

The legal methods paper that is due around midterms is the closed memo. It is called a closed memo because the research is provided for you; thus, research is closed. You’ll spend a lot of time in class talking about this paper so for me to hash out all of its requirements would be a waste. As for the tips, first, start early. This seems pretty obvious but writing in a new format can eat up time and there will be little hiccups that slow you down. Second, there is a word limit and I guarantee you that when you finish your first draft you’ll be about 300 words over that limit. So, start writing efficiently from the beginning. This is where that vocab book and phrase thesaurus I recommended for summer reading will come in handy. Chances are you’ll still probably spend more time taking words off the page than you did putting them on it. Third, go to office hours often. The only person that you can really trust to tell if you’re heading in the right direction is the person who will be grading it and, besides, you’re not allowed to work with anyone else. So, go see your professor, ask a lot of questions, and make sure you understand what they want. When I was writing my paper, I kept a piece of paper close and wrote down the questions as they came up, then took that paper during office hours. Fourth, edit, edit, edit, and make sure you know where a comma and semicolon go (see The Elements of Style by Strunk and White).

As for studying for the doctrinal course midterms, first, the core of exam studying in law school is the course outline. The outline is a condensed version of your notes. My outlines consisted of information from my notes, the textbook, and whatever source I found helpful. As with everything in law school there is a strategy to outline making. Some people start their outline very early and add little by little as the course progresses and others wait until the last minute. I take the middle road. I feel that starting super late may put you in a time crunch where you aren’t left enough time to actually learn what you’ve put into the outline. Conversely, I feel that starting super early causes me to forget all the information from the beginning of the year. I have a habit of leaving out information that seems very obvious at the time but when reviewed two months later makes absolutely no sense. So, a month, or so, before exams I work on my outlines. When exams come around, the info is still pretty fresh and I also have enough time to memorize it all.

While outlines are great at helping to memorize all of the rules and exceptions to those rules, a huge part of law school exams are recognition of fact patterns and the application of the rules to those facts. So, tip number two is get a hold of some of your professor’s old exams and practice taking them. However, there is probably only going to be two or so exams on file for you to practice on. So, get a hold of some kind of study aid. I was/am a big fan of the examples and explanations books. They give an easy to read narrative type review of the material and then give practice questions with answers. For tip number three, I would say write and rewrite your rule statements. It’s great that you know what the rule is but, if you just try to free ball it during the exams, your perfectly memorized rules will devolve somewhere between the brain and your pen into incomplete sentences. Also, having the rules already written leaves you more time to discuss its application to the exam facts, which is where you get most of your points. Finally, do not stay up all night. I made this mistake as part of my no regrets policy with myself. My thinking was that, rather than have regrets about whether I spent enough time studying, I would just spend the maximum amount of time. And, while cramming all night may work perfectly well for a binge and purge undergrad essay on the three Punic wars, being fatigued while writing a very analytical exam is another story.

It really all boils down to practice and more practice. My results for midterms weren’t too bad, but I was middle of the pack. At the time I was very disappointed. I remember thinking that I had worked the hardest I had ever worked before and I still hadn’t excelled. But you can’t let little disappointments shape the rest of your law school career. Midterms are all trial and error, and after some errors, you figure it out and you end up being right where you want to be.

Feel free to ask questions by emailing aaronsblog@mail.widener.edu or clicking the discuss link.