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October 21, 2003

Midterm II

Tow other things I learned from the experience of taking one midterm: First, one midterm is better than three. See Not for Sheep's experience for more on that. (Question: Under what testing conditions would a 50-page outline really be helpful? I'm thinking it could be great for a take-home exam, but otherwise, who has time to flip through it? Index? Brilliant idea!)

Second, I should have read Getting to Maybe last summer like Sue suggested. I've read bits of it, and that's enough to know it's worth reading in full.

To prep us for the exam (or was it to further convince us to give them lots of money?) the BarBri folks sent USC law prof Charles Whitebread to give us some exam-taking tips. Whitebread is the author of The Eight Secrets of Top Exam Performance In Law School, which BarBri gives away for free by the truckload. Whitebread's talk consisted of a 40-minute shorthand version of everything in the book, so if he comes to your school, I'd say go listen to him because then you won't need to read the book. The best tip I think he gave was to take the first 10-15 minutes of your exam period to get thoroughly familiar with the question and to organize (outline) your answer. If you do that, you'll have a good plan to follow and then you can just type out your plan.

Another great tip of Whitebread's was to use "the magic words": "But if there were.... but if he has...." The real magic word seems to be "If" because it allows you to explore more options with the facts and increases the chances you'll hit the issues and rules your prof was looking for when he/she wrote the exam. Of course, I have no idea how I did on the test so it's hard to say if this really works, but I can say that the sample answer my prof gave to a sample test used lots of "ifs" and I found it helpful.

Both Whitebread and Getting to Maybe were helpful in advising me not to waste time citing cases or quoting authority, and both encourage students to get right to the point; i.e., begin with "The first issue is...." But while Whitebread advocates the IRAC method for those issues, Getting to Maybe thinks IRAC might just get in the way of exploring the issues fully and that it might also lead students to be too conclusory. I didn't really use IRAC, exactly, for whatever that's worth. And in the end, I guess it's hard to say what advice was good advice until I know how I did. I'll let you know when they tell me, supposedly sometime before Thanksgiving.

Posted October 21, 2003 05:48 AM | law school


Is there a website out there that actually explains what IRAC is and how you go about it? Every law school book and blog I've read reference IRAC, but no one's defined it. Is it one of those things you learn along with the secret handshake on orientation day?

Posted by: falconred at October 21, 2003 11:07 AM

Yeah, IRAC is part of the inner secrets of the temple. I still haven't had a formal lesson in it, exactly, but it's basically an acronym for one way to organize legal arguments: You state the Issue, followed by the Rule that will decide the issue, followed by your Analysis or Application applying the rule to the facts of your case, followed by your Conclusion. This is roughly how we've learned to write legal memos thus far, and some people say you should use this pattern in answering exam questions, as well.

That's about all I know about it. It's helpful, actually, but limited.

Posted by: ambimb at October 21, 2003 04:35 PM

I skipped that dude's talk and just grabbed the free book. I heard he spent a lot of talking about "USC." ;) I thought the book was pretty helpful and sort of reinforced what I do anyway with practice essay questions.

I'm now reading Getting to Maybe and I think it is more helpful then old Whitebread. Another person mentioned making an Index/TOC for her outline -- such a great idea!

Posted by: Cinnamon at October 22, 2003 08:34 PM

I skipped that dude's talk and just grabbed the free book. I heard he spent a lot of talking about "USC." ;) I thought the book was pretty helpful and sort of reinforced what I do anyway with practice essay questions.

I'm now reading Getting to Maybe and I think it is more helpful then old Whitebread. Another person mentioned making an Index/TOC for her outline -- such a great idea!

Posted by: Cinnamon at October 22, 2003 08:36 PM

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