Chapter Seven: The Next Semester
It’s a brand new semester. Your grades are in. You are devastated, exhilarated, relieved, puzzled, or angry… or maybe all of these feelings and more. How do you continue to improve your performance in law school each semester? Few students take advantage of the awesome power of reflection on the past as a learning tool.
Of course, immediately after a semester’s exams, you are best to simply try to forget the entire experience. The costs in anxiety, competition, and lost confidence from post-exam comparisons with others are rarely worth the gains. However, after the exams are graded, be sure to continue to learn from the process. Students often neglect to use this outstanding tool for improving their exam performance — a review of their prior semester’s work and exam performance.
Reviewing your past semester’s learning
Look back over your past semester’s work and inventory your learning. Don’t automatically assume that your grades tell you what you’ve learned (they are a clue, but there’s many a person who has gotten a bad grade on an exam in a subject they learned well and others who have gotten good grades on subjects they have retained only long enough to get the grade). Since one of your purposes in law school is to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for a successful lifetime of lawyering, stop and reflect on what you have learned. Consider your past semester’s study approaches in light of that reflection. Some questions to consider:
· Which subject matter do you feel you have retained the best? What factors contributed to that retention? Did you study harder, longer? Were you more interested in the subject matter? Were the learning materials you used different or better for that subject? How can you take those learning advantages for that subject and apply them to this semester’s study?
· How did you capitalize on your learning style strengths when studying for a subject? Do you want to reconsider some approaches (e.g., listening to taped lectures was a waste, typing all my notes really nailed the subject for me)?
· How about your study schedule? If you “burned out” at some point during last semester, when and why? Can you plan your semester to avoid (or at least accommodate) that need to catch your breath?
· How did you outline? Be sure to save your outlines so that you can compare them to your final exams and see what you had and what you didn’t.
· Overall, how much time did you spend preparing for classes, in post exam review, in preparing for the final exam? Do you think it would be productive to reallocate some of that time this semester?
· Did you at any time study with anyone else? Will you reconsider that arrangement this semester or do you want to replicate it?
· Look forward to this semester’s courses. How do they look as though they will be the same as last semester’s classes (e.g., code courses require the same kind of close reading and “book juggling” regardless of the subject matter; courses with lots of history or theory as emphasis require another kind of attention)? Compare classes and make decisions about approaches to studying each of this semester’s classes.
Reviewing your past semester’s grades
Now, consider your exam performance. Get a copy of your final exam, if permitted, and read over the questions and your answer carefully. If the professor has a grading rubric or answer key for the exam, you should ask if you can review that as well. To the extent you can, answer these questions about your exam answer:
· What was your goal for the exam? Were you satisfied with your results?
· Did you spot all the issues? What types did you miss? (For example, are there issues that you saw, but considered unnecessary or superfluous because other issues “answered the question”?) For issues that you simply didn’t see, why do you think you didn’t see them (didn’t read facts carefully enough? didn’t understand the issue? didn’t remember the issue?)
· Did you waste time? Look for places where you wrote a lot, but earned no points because you were restating facts; copying excessive quotes; reciting history, background or general policies of the law — apart from using this to analyze an issue.
· Did you answer the question asked?
· Did you accurately state the law?
· Did you read the facts accurately?
· Did you make unwarranted assumptions?
· Did you organize your answer well?
· Did you analyze the application of the rule to the facts thoroughly?
· Did you analyze both sides of the issue?
· Did you complete the exam? Did you manage your time?
· Where did you miss most of your points? If you missed issues or stated the law inaccurately, was this because the material was inaccurate or omitted from your notes or because you had not sufficiently reviewed? (compare your exam with your outline and study materials) If you missed analysis, was this because you ran out of time, didn’t see the need for the analysis, or didn’t understand the material well enough to provide the analysis?
· What is your goal for the next exam?
Meeting with your professor
Make an appointment with all of your professors to talk about your exam performance (regardless of your grades). Prepare yourself for this meeting to get the most out of it. First, prepare your attitude. This is your opportunity to get some very specific feedback on your exam performance. You should approach this meeting with an attitude of detached curiosity. Think of yourself as an anthropologist, trying to understand some curious native ritual. This is NOT an opportunity to try to get your grade changed (it won’t happen and if it does it won’t be because you tried to make it happen). Nor is this a time to apologize for or defend your performance – the professor is not judging you as a person based on your exam. Professors know all too well that an exam is one brief period of time. They know people have good days and bad. They will not suddenly consider you brilliant or brainless depending on the grade that you got on the exam.
Second, decide what you need to learn. What kinds of questions might you ask that will help you improve your exam performance in the future? If the professor does not have a grading rubric nor has any written clues as to where you did well and where you did poorly, you will need to start by simply going through the exam and having the professor highlight the exam’s hits and misses. If you have a pretty good idea from having reviewed the exam and any grading feedback the professor provided, you may still have questions about what more you could have done. If your preliminary review doesn’t tell you what issues or analysis you missed, ask about the kinds of arguments that you could have made but didn’t. Ask the professor to point out any areas where you wasted your time on the exam. If you are concerned that your writing or organization of an answer could be improved, try doing that. Re-write one question and ask the professor whether you have improved it. Be sure to let the professor know that you are not doing this to try to secure a grade change!
Meet with your colleagues
Perhaps one of the most powerful ways to learn from your past exam performance is to compare your exam answers with others. If you were disappointed in your exam performance, ask a colleague who did well whether you can compare your answer with theirs (assuming the professor allows this use of past exams). If you did well, be open to sharing your answer with your peers.
Plan your new semester
Don’t assume that the learning tasks that you were presented with in the prior semester will be the same each semester. Each professor is different and each semester of law school presents new challenges. With each semester your professors are likely to expect your skills of judgment and precision to increase. A first semester exam might score very well by generating numerous arguments on either side of an issue – no matter how unlikely or impractical those arguments might be in practice. The same answer to the same question in an advanced course in your third year will be unlikely to be as successful. Your workloads will often increase each semester as well. Professors will assume more prior knowledge that you may or may not actually have. They will assume greater skill in reading and analyzing the law. They will have new skills and knowledge that may require new approaches to study. Even if the classes do not change one iota from the first semester, your own schedules will fill more – with the social life of the law school, with job searches or work, with bar preparation, with extracurricular learning activities, etc. Take these new and additional demands into account as you consider your study methods.
If you feel like you’ve failed
The experience of failure (real or perceived) is one that requires some separate attention. You may be feeling ashamed and hurt that your grades were not what you wanted. If your grades have placed you in academic jeopardy, you are likely feeling fearful or hopeless. Needless to say, these emotions will provide sufficient distraction to your learning that you must find a way to move past the last semester and turn the experience in your favor. Here are a few thoughts to help you with that process.
First, remember that all is not lost. Some students take longer to “catch on” than others. It is not uncommon for a student’s first semester to be their worst semester in law school. Have confidence that you can improve. Think of it this way. The law school has little incentive to retain students who will not be able to graduate and pass the bar examination. A faculty has a choice about the grade point at which it dismisses students and the number of semesters they will allow students to remedy deficient grades. If we did not believe that a student could raise their grades after falling below the required grade point, we would not give you that extra time. We would simply dismiss you and admit a transfer student to take your place. Our experience tells us that students can and do recover from a bad semester’s grades. Some of us had a bad semester’s grades.
Second, you don’t have to change much to get ahead. Don’t presume that your grades have accurately predicted your ability. Maybe you just had crummy luck this time. Maybe you had crummy teachers. Very likely, you just missed one piece of the puzzle that may be obvious to you when you take the time to look through your exams and work with your professors to find the problem. Often the difference between a C- and a B is really quite small. Sometimes all you have to do is learn to argue the other side of every issue and BINGO! You’re in the game! For first semester students, a number simply didn’t “get it” until they experienced exams. You might be one of those. Now that you know what you are preparing for because you’ve experienced it, you are in a position to better assess what works and what doesn’t in your study habits. It’s not uncommon, for example, for students to spend all semester thinking about the “big picture” of doctrines – what is intent? Why does the law favor predictability in this area? Etc. – and fail to memorize and master the details of the black-letter law. Sometimes students are so focused on the details (the individual cases they’ve read) that they don’t pull back and learn the generalized doctrine. Well, you need the big picture and you need the cases, but you need the law too. On the other hand, sometimes students become so intent on memorizing the black-letter law that they don’t look for the grey areas and learn to make arguments in the grey areas. Exams in which all you do is recite the law are not passing exams (or just barely pass). So it may be some really basic part of the law school exam picture that you’ve simply missed to this point. Look for it. It’s there. Once you find it, you’re back in the game. Perhaps you had something happen in one or more exams that could explain your performance. Exam anxiety hit? Go to the counseling center and get tested and learn how to deal with this common but significant cause of poor grades.
Sometimes you’ve simply had a bad semester for non-academic reasons and you haven’t really taken stock of the other pressures that are getting in your way. Maybe you are quite ambivalent about law school – it’s what your family wants for you, but you really aren’t sure it’s what you want. (That doesn’t mean you need to know what you want to do with the degree, but you do have to want to degree itself!) Address your issues outside of law school and you’re back in the game!
Third, get some help. I don’t know any student who has ever successfully completed law school alone. Get some effective study help through the academic support program and by finding effective study partners. If you suspect the study partners or social circle that you’ve been relying on up until now is part of the problem, move on. Of equal importance is getting some help with your confidence and motivation. That might require a couple of visits to the counseling center. No shame here – half of the clientele of any University’s counseling center is likely to be law students (the other half is med students). Enlist all the cheerleaders in your life. Revisit your prior successes. They weren’t flukes. This experience of academic failure was the fluke. Get some help to get past it, and you will once again experience success.
Visit lawdibles.classcaster.net to listen to the podcasts related to this chapter: Improving Exam Taking Skills by Reviewing Last Semester’s Exams and the Relationship Between Law School and Jobs.
[1] Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970) was an American humanistic psychologist who developed a theory of motivation. The need hierarchy is a central premise of that theory. His writings include: TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING (1962) and FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE (1971). They are arranged in terms of the priority of our needs (i.e., you can’t effectively fulfill your need for knowledge if you are hungry).
[2] See, Frank Robinson, Effective Study (4th ed. 1970). New York: Harper & Row.
[3] This case could appear in a basic torts casebook, a products liability text, or even in a contracts or civil procedure text. How you would read the case would depend on the course and topic for which you are studying the case. We will presume here that you are studying this case in a basic torts class, as part of your study of negligence.
[4] This case is from the New York Court of Appeals. In almost every other state, a “court of appeals” is an intermediate court of appeal, with the highest court being the supreme court. In New York, the Court of Appeals is the highest court in the state. These are the little tidbits about legal systems you pick up along the way in law school.
[5] Notice that this is a very old case. There are several reasons you may be reading a case from two centuries ago. One is that the case may represent a historically significant perspective: either as a representative of how the law used to be or as a representative of how the current law came to be. A second reason for very old cases to appear in your casebook is that old cases may still be very good law, especially in an area of law that may not have changed much over time (for example, notice the year of the cases cited in Conti v. ASPCA).
[6] Be curious. Did you know that Ch. J. stands for Chief Justice?
[7] Even words that you think you know the meaning of may have very distinct legal meanings. Look them up.
[8] Sometimes you might want to look up information about the facts in a case. If you don’t know what belladonna is or how it might have been used, this might be useful to your understanding of the case.
[9] This is a very complicated transaction. You will be able to understand it much better if you find a way to translate it into a series of clear steps that you can restate without reference to the case.
[10] Procedural facts are often hard to master at first. You must be able to not only define nonsuit, but understand how these procedural facts affect the way this case was decided.
[11] This is a key term. Be sure you have looked it up and worked to understand it.
[12] Often your casebook cases will be heavily edited versions of the actual case. If the case doesn’t make any sense to you, sometimes reading the original full-length version can help. Beware, however, often what is cut from the case can be distracting issues your professor does not want you to consider for the purposes of the course in which you reading this case.
[13] Is this a disagreement about what the law provides or how it should apply to this case? This is always an essential question in any case.
[14] This is slow-going. You will need to translate this into modern English before you can begin to understand it. This is an instance where working with another person can help. Avoid the temptation to simply give up and read a third-party description of the case (such as a commercial study guide or online case briefing service). Part of the skill you are learning is the ability to translate this kind of arcane language.
[15] Stop here and try to state the law as it existed before this case. When, if ever, would a remote seller be liable to a consumer for a defective product? Why was this the rule? Notice that you may have to come up with those reasons yourself rather than find them in the opinion.
[16] What is the “difference” that makes the difference here? Review the prior examples. Do they seem so clearly different to you?
[17] Another vocabulary word!
[18] Notice that would be under the criminal law. If you are studying torts, it is not important that you know what the law of manslaughter is. What is important is that you understand how the court draws by analogy to the criminal law in its reasoning.
[19] Isn’t that true in many cases? Rarely does a manufacturer sell directly to a consumer. How important is this factor to the court’s outcome?
[20] Here is a good example of reasoning that you don’t want to mimic in your own legal writing. Rhetorical questions are rarely excellent methods for convincing a skeptical audience.
[21] Here is a perfect example to practice your ability to draw express analogies. How is a gun and a horse like a bottle of drugs.
[22] As you are trying to draw the holding out of this case remember the categories of IF X THEN Y, IF …, EVEN THOUGH… AT LEAST SO LONG AS…. Which of these categories does this paragraph seem to be filling in?
