I think it’s something more about the law school exam than the law student that leads to the incessant beating of the dead horse that is a final exam. Yes, law students are fragile, neurotic, caffeinated people (we’re working on this), so it’s not like none of the blame rests with them. But law school exams have a couple of characteristics that makes students want to break them down after they take them:
- They generally have no right answer.
- They generally are time pressured, so you can’t get everything down you want.
- Strategies for taking them abound, so people like to discuss it.
All this discussion leads to the classic law school scenario where someone comes out of an exam feeling great, hears a different and equally valid way to approach the exam, and freaks out thinking he or she did it wrong. If it happens to a student at the beginning of an exam period, it’s likely to kill any momentum.
Law school advice books like Law School Confidential have elaborate systems for analyzing your performance on an exam. But it’s not that hard. It’s a simple three-step process that can help identify problems, build confidence, and help a bruised ego.
1. Ask yourself how well you prepared
The first step is to ask yourself how good your preparation was. Note that this does not mean “How many hours did I study” or “How big was my outline”. Also, you must be willing to acknowledge that you could always have done a little more. You could have stayed up an extra hour here, or done an additional practice exam there. So you have to be realistic.
The question is really asking whether you felt you had prepared yourself well. Did you take preparing for the exam seriously? Did you have a plan for studying and follow it through? Did you begin to grasp the material, or did things being to fall into place? Conversely, did you blow off the studying for that exam? Were you overconfident? Were you behind in reading and had to catch up?
You need to think back to the beginning of the exam and ask yourself if you felt prepared. The answer to this question is not “I really struggled, so I didn’t feel prepared.” That’s not specific enough of a question and doesn’t ask the right things. You cannot let what happened during the exam change your perception of how you prepared (at least not at this stage).
2. Given how well you prepared, ask yourself how well you performed in the exam room
The second step is to focus on the exam itself. You’ll be asking yourself how well you did, based on your preparation. That first part though of that heading is key. You need to control for how well you prepared. Too many law students would say “I didn’t study well, so I performed poorly,” and that’s often not the case.
Say you got behind in a class, were playing catch-up all year, and didn’t do the type of studying you would have hoped. But when you got to the exam room, you stayed calm, did your best, got something reasonable down on paper, and maybe even got lucky with the focus of the exam questions. In that case, the answer to this question is going to be positive.
Alternatively, you might have studied extremely well for an exam. You had great outlines, had everything down pat. And then you went into the exam room and were thrown for a loop. Maybe it was in a different format that you expected, or maybe you got sick. Maybe you just didn’t have a good breakfast. But be sure to focus specifically on what you did in the exam room, not how much you studied.
3. Reflect on your assessments
If you answered positively on both counts, then great. Let the exam go. You did all you can do to maximze a good grade, and the rest is up to the professor liking what you wrote. Don’t fret that exam anymore, especially not until you see your grade.
If you answered negatively to either or both question, ask yourself if you know the reason. Maybe you know you managed your time poorly when preparing. Maybe you did too much a certain type of studying that wasn’t very helpful. Maybe you were sick. Maybe you have exam anxiety that you need to work on. In that case, don’t fret the exam anymore, especially not until you see your grade. You know what probably went wrong, you know what you can do to fix it, and besides, maybe it didn’t turn out as bad as you thought.
Finally, do this all alone. Take a few minutes to do this by yourself before you’re surrounded by students who want to talk about the exam. I’d discourage talking about the exam, but if you were confident you had a good overall performance from studying to testing or you know what might have tripped you up, it will hopefully give you the confidence to talk about law without getting freaked out just because the subject was just on a final exam. And it should give the confidence to build momentum during finals or the tools to improve the next time out.
