One last word of advice before finals || December

I t is now December, and just when 1Ls are figuring out how to brief cases and write memos, the first set of law school finals loom ahead. Fear not, however, if you have been keeping up with your workload, finals shouldn’t be that terrifying. And if you fell off the wagon sometime between orientation and today? All hope is not lost for you, either. That goes for you too, 2Ls and 3Ls.

In preparing for finals, the first thing to come to grips with as a first-year law student is that for some classes, the final exam is the whole enchilada, i.e. your final grade will be based on a three-hour examination.

As daunting as this may seem, there are two things to remember: (1) your classmates’ grades are all decided similarly, and (2) you will have had four months to prepare by the time you sit down for the exam. With a bit of due diligence and confidence, exam season can be tackled successfully and with minimal loss of sanity.

Before buying up every study guide ever published and sequestering yourself in a sensory-deprivation chamber for the next month, figure yourself out. Do you function well with others, or are you a lone wolf who gets distracted in study groups? Can you sit in a windowless room for hours, or do you need sunlight and frequent mental breaks? Figure yourself out first, or preparing for exams becomes that much more difficult. From experience, one approach that works well is learning the “black letter law” on your own first. Once you know that cold, work through old exams and other hypos with others under exam settings. Then discuss the problems and approaches to answering them with your study group.

Do not underestimate the value of outlines, particularly creating your own. While it is convenient that law students’ favorite tutors, Emmanuel and Gilbert, have outlined courses for you at the price of $30 a pop or that you were able to get an outline from an upper-level student, there really is no substitute for writing your own. Is it more time consuming? Sure, but there is something to be said for actually grappling with the material in your notes (you do take notes, right?), organizing and synthesizing it in your own head, and putting it down on paper yourself. Write your own outlines, and use the others to supplement and fill in gaps.

Besides, it is highly unlikely your professors will write their exams consulting what Gilbert says about Contracts or Evidence. Try to have your outlines written and distilled by the start of the reading period, so you can spend the semester’s home stretch working on old exams and other fact patterns rather than trying to learn and synthesize September’s Equal Protection notes.

So, what study guides should you be opening more often? A popular choice, and one often recommended by professors, is the Examples and Explanations series.

These can become quite useful at finals time, as they provide a stable of sample fact patterns that are pretty fair depictions of actual exam questions. As the title of the series suggests, these examples are followed by thorough explanations of how to go about addressing the issues the fact pattern creates. This takes much of the legwork out of having to create your own fact patterns, which may be particularly difficult for 1Ls who have yet to see actual exams.

Couple the Examples and Explanations with actual exams from previous semesters (on reserve in the library or sometimes available from individual professors), and you have a strong basis on which to work from in preparing to tackle an exam situation.

As a last recommendation, relax. Particularly for 1Ls, exam time can wreck emotional and mental havoc. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, know the audience you are writing for, and Fall 2007 will be in the rearview mirror before you know it.