Jessie Zaylía's Law (and Law School) Blog

Ok, I'll be honest. You could grab about 10 random law grads, and I'm willing to bet that each would have strong feelings about the answer to this blog's topic. I'm going to let you in on a little secret... "you" being the 1L: none of you know what you are doing. This is completely acceptable! It's just that 1L paranoia begins to set in rather rapidly as you begin law school, and you--along with the rest of your colleagues--will all pretend (consciously or not) that you DO know what you're doing. This fact relates to study groups in a very poignant way: namely, a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about getting together and putting forth their ideas does not appear helpful at the outset as a means of study. You'll here over and over as a 1L that by the time you reach your third year of law school, you just "get it." This is really true. And it becomes both laughable and painful to study next to a bunch of 1L...

About mid-semester, if I'm being smart, I start busting out some practice exams. But why now? Why would I start doing that before I have a full course's worth of materials to incorporate? I'll tell you why: Doing practice exams over a prolonged period of time makes your thinking and analysis on the day of the exam go very smoothly because, after all, you've done it before. Personally, the more I do, the better I tend to perform. However, this doesn't hold up as well if I wait until the last few days before the exam. I think one reason for this is because doing the exams creates a more holistic approach in terms of everyday learning in class. By the time you take the real exam, you've been so used to analyzing problems for your class a certain way that it becomes a cinch. Note: I have a very specific way that I use practice exams. I only take exams that have either model answers (by the top scoring student) or model outlines (by the professor who gave...