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 05:48 AM | Comments (4) | law school