- Start practice exams early. Now, let me clarify. First, you would want to get copies of exams fairly early, in order to beat the rush later on. As far as begining practice exams, you certainly don't want to wait until two weeks before finals. Four to six weeks prior may be better.
- Structure your time. This includes study time, class time, and play time.
- Get help before it becomes a problem. I think this is especially important for minority students because I've heard on countless occaisions that law school can be more difficult for us. If you have an academic support department, that's a good place to start.
- Educate yourself early about the Bar exam. If you know the jurisdiction you would like to practice law, begin researching the requirements. If you think you'll want to practice in multiple places, research them all to determine the best way to go about planning for taking each Bar exam.
- Think of yourself as a professional. Professionalism begins day one in law school. Whatever you do in law school, good or bad, will follow you into the profession.
- Bring a digital clock during exams. Apparently some have problems reading analog clocks or the anxiety of test taking makes it a bit difficult. Honestly, I could totally see myself having this issue.
- Go over exams with professsors. This includes any practice exam questions you undertake, as well as your actual final. This will hopefully help guide you to what it is the professor is looking for in exam answers. I honestly wonder how easy (or hard) this might be. I guess I will find out in the next couple of months, eh?
So, do any current 1L's (now 2L's) or future 1L's have any suggestions that might help one get a leg up in law school? If so, please share!
The advice sounds good, except for the first one. My school has the old exams online, so there was never a rush for them, but just reading a few of the ones for contracts freaked me out big time. In four to six weeks, you will still have a lot of things to cover, and a great deal of it will be on the exams you are looking at.
ReplyDeleteSo there you are with 4-6 weeks left in the semester, looking at these exams and you see a lot of stuff you don't know. Entire questions you can't answer. Then you wonder if you don't know it because you haven't learned it yet, or because you weren't paying attention/were absent one day, or because you suck at issue spotting, or simply because you haven't started studying. And that's when you freak out because at that point you don't know which one it is. Not helpful.
I don't know when you should start, since I've never actually sat down and did a practice exam in an exam like environment, but 6 weeks sounds way too early to me.
Thanks for the tips! I will be going to the AIE in L.A., so I plan to soak in as much info and advice as well.
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