Ace Law School Exams: 4 Exam Prep Tweaks

Do you want to be in the top 10 percent of your class? Are you frustrated  about the fact that no matter how much you study, you are never able to make the break? Or even if you spend all your time in the semester studying just to get marks which are marginally above average, without doing anything else (which includes participating in co-curriculars like mooting and debating, playing sports and partying as well) read on to find out how you can  significantly increase your marks with considerably less preparation time.

But before that, I shall clear a fundamental misconception about scoring well and professional success. 

Does scoring well in law school it indicate that you will be a good lawyer? Definitely not. Your professional success is going to depend hugely on your soft skills, such as effective networking, public relations skills, managerial skills and ability to effectively delegate and monitor work, etc. However, it is very difficult to learn and test these under the regime of a three hour examination.
Nevertheless, is scoring high marks really important? Yes, of course it is. Scoring well and being at the top of your batch in your exams is your gateway to  great jobs, internships, higher studies, scholarships, etc. It may keep your morale high, and get you more respect from peers. It plays a crucial role in opening doors for you.

We have covered the skills important to be a lawyer before and will keep covering them in future. Here, I will write about how you can score well in exams. Note that it is important for you not to spend all your time in law school preparing for exams, since studying will not provide the requisite skills to be a good lawyer, and scoring well in exams will not be an indicator that you will do well professionally. So, here are a few tips that you may find useful.

1. Know your teacher

You must know the preferences of the teacher – some teachers prefer that you write what is taught in class religiously, and do not provide a premium for having read the study material (modules) or any text book. Others really appreciate if you mention something extra – from the study material, a leading textbook or legal commentary, or from an article in a reputed journal, etc. For them, the class notes are merely some form of outline, which can never suffice for the exam, but is only the starting point. There are still others, who don't care what you have read, as long as your arguments are correct, original and as long as you have applied your mind to the specific problem or question given in the exam, and customized your answer to that question.

The strategy for preparing for each kind of teacher is going to be significantly different. So, as the first step, you must find out for every subject, which category your teacher belongs to. This exercise must be repeated every semester. Of course, it helps a great deal if a teacher who has already taught you a subject earlier is taking some subject again, as you may already know about his or her preferences and marking tendencies.

2. Know what the teacher has discussed

You should know which sub-topics the teacher has discussed on each subject and topic. If the teacher is one who prefers you to stick to what was discussed in class, it becomes imperative to know the class notes really well. It is not necessary for you to attend the class for this – you can take a set of notes from a reliable student in the class (assuming they are willing to supply to you). For the sake of safety, take multiple sets of notes, so that you are able to make up for the shortfalls in one student's notes (say, due to his absence on certain days) by studying another set of notes as well.

3. Plan your exam taking strategy in advance

If you have attended even half of the classes, you will notice that a teacher has discussed and revised particular topics repeatedly. You will also note that these questions are also feature very often in the exam question paper. If you make a mental note of these, it becomes very easy for you to visualize some of the questions in the exam, and you can prepare the answers in your mind. In fact, you can do additional research on the issues and include your own responses, opinions and comments as well, as teachers love original thinking.

Depending on what category your teacher belongs to (from point 1), you must strategise your focus areas accordingly. You will have to choose a mix of reading from class notes, textbooks, leading articles, cases, and developing your own individual arguments and criticisms that is optimally suited for the faculty teaching the subject.

Also, remember not to overkill on articles and other extra reading materials. You only have three hours to write your paper, so from an exam taking perspective, aim to study and remember only those things which you can write within the time given to you. To simplify your task, you can always make it a point to write down about 2 core arguments and a one-line conclusion from an article. Usually, if the article is from Westlaw, the abstract helps a great deal in this exercise. Make an attempt to remember the name of the author who has made a particular argument. It can indicate that you have done some serious additional research and fetch more marks.

4. Practise your writing skills

Many smart students fare poorly in their exams because:

• Their handwriting is illegible or their answersheets are generally untidy,
• They don't express their thoughts clearly in the paper.

It is important to cover the essential features of the concepts first, before moving onto the more subtle nuances and adding your own original comments.

• They write huge chunks of information that are unstructured and cluttered together.

The following tips may be useful to significantly change your writing skills:

Use bullets and numbering in your exam to structure your answers. You may need about a mniute or two to plan your answer before you start writing it, and you can also use a rough sheet of it. Some students can make a mental plan of their answer. An exact plan is not always necessary, you need to have a rough idea to proceed and you can fill in the details later.

In fact, even the bullets and numbering can be filled in after you have completed your answer, so as to make it look structured and planned.

The following tools may be used to structure your answer, to emphasize on particular areas and to make it look neat overall:

1. Break your answer into paragraphs, of 3-7 lines each.
2. Use headings for different paragraphs dealing with the same issue. Underline or use capital letters for the headings.
3. Use different levels of numbering and sub-bulletting for your answer.
4. Always use separate and bold headings whenever you are adding some of your own comments . You can use something like – CRITICISM OF HART'S THEORIES, or MY OPINION ON NEW IT RULES, etc.
5. I don't prefer the use of pencils or pens of different inks as that leads to undue wastage while switching pens from time to time.

Try these out diligently for the next couple of semesters, and let us know the results and your improvement each semester by commenting on this post or by writing to us.