Your first year grades will depend primarily on how you perform on your final exam. Accordingly, the best possible use of your time, in preparing for that exam, is to take practice tests. Your professor probably has some previous exams on reserve in the library; if not, exams from other professors who have taught the same course are probably on reserve.
Practice tests will help you with time management when the real exam comes around, and get you familiar with the format. So when you take the final exam, you should have completely figured out how to write an exam essay. The typical first year law school exam is very different from essay questions in college. Your job in the law school exam is simply to spot the relevant legal issues in a particular factual context, and explain the pro/con arguments that are relevant to analysis of the legal situation. Beautiful writing is not important. You are just presenting an organized listing of how the law might be applied to a given set of facts.
You absolutely should not wait until the final weeks of the semester to begin your practice exams. Within a few weeks, you will have covered enough material so that you can answer at least some exam questions. For example, if your Torts class is one semester, you will probably be finished with intentional torts no later than early October. At that point, you can practice the essay on a Torts exam which covers intentional torts. (A typical exam might have one essay on intentional torts, one on negligence, and one on strict liability.) Continue reading Tips for new law students…
