Over the years, our Pre-L advisors Rob Cacace and Jordana Confino have shared their best tips for 1L success—you can read those first four tips here. Spivey Consulting’s Pre-L advising and 1L Success Coaching were busier than ever last year, and they’re again sharing insights from the trenches.
Stay tuned for future blog posts coming this spring, in which Rob and Jordana will be sharing more tips, including for career readiness. Given the increasingly fast pace of recruiting at law school, 1L fall grades and career preparation are more important than ever.
Ready to talk more about your 1L prep strategy and how to hit the ground running when you get to campus? Send a note to info@spiveyconsulting.com and we’ll connect you to one of our Pre-L advisors for a free initial consultation to discuss an approach that makes sense for you. Pre-L spots fill fast, and sessions start as early as this month.
“Begin with the end in mind.” One of the seven habits of highly effective people (at least according to Stephen Covey), this phrase has particular resonance in law school. The advice applies to career prep (stay tuned to our blog for more on that) as well as coursework, which is the focus of this post.
What we’re saying may feel counterintuitive in the moment—you may find yourself thinking at the start of law school: “I can barely keep up with the reading I’ll be asked about tomorrow. You want me to be thinking about the end of the semester?!” But because so much of your success in 1L is tethered to your performance on the final exam, it makes good sense to focus on those exams as early as possible. Unlike undergrad, where an exam may be just a part of your grade and test from just a portion of the material, in most 1L classes your final exam grade is the whole enchilada. And while you may have previously gotten away with cramming for exams late in the semester, success on law school exams requires extensive preparation and planning. (Want more on exam prep? Take a look at our post on practicing for finals.)
Advanced planning may sound simple enough. But the trickiest part about preparing for exams is knowing how to do so effectively in any given class. Each professor has their own approach to writing exams, so format, length, and content will vary; additionally, each provides access to study tools in a unique way and may have different expectations as to what constitutes a quality exam answer. Like we said, tricky. But, with the right planning and preparation, it is very much doable—and knowing how to artfully deploy the right strategies will help set you apart from your classmates (which, within the forced curve of most 1L courses, is vital).
Below we’ll provide some of our favorite action steps for exam prep, starting from the very beginning of the semester. (These tips pair well with our tips for analyzing your syllabi early.)
Week One:
- Find the past exam bank and download your professors’ exams. Most schools have a website where you can review exams that were given in prior years. Sometimes it’s connected to the library’s site, sometimes to a different (or even external) site. Talk to upper-division students you met during orientation, to TAs, to librarians, or to Dean’s Office staff to figure out where your school houses this resource. If your school provides access, download all the exams given by your professor, foldering exams by class. Bonus points for tracking down model answers!
- Make a spreadsheet of your exam inventory. Based on what you’re able to find, start a spreadsheet with a tab for each class. Give each past exam its own row. For instance, if your Torts professor has three past exams available, all from Fall semesters in the recent past, row one might be “F2021,” row two “F2022,” and row three “F2023.” (Column headers may vary; as noted below, you’ll be reviewing the past exams and noting key features.) It’s important to know the resource landscape and eventually come up with a plan for using them. You’ll add to this document during your first week and as the semester progresses.
- Read the instructions for the past exams. Instruction pages on law school exams can extend multiple pages! Do the work of understanding them before your case reading takes over. Some professors tell you the body of law you are applying; others may note the relative value of each question (and suggested time allotment); still other professors will preview what *types* of questions will be asked. Most law school exams are heavy on “issue-spotter” questions: long fictional fact patterns that call on the student to “spot” (identify) legal questions that may be relevant, and then analyze those legal issues using rules and principles learned throughout the semester. But many professors will include other types of questions. You need to know if part of your assessment will be, e.g., multiple-choice questions, policy questions (what the law should be), and/or theoretical questions. The instructions may provide clues. Cross-reference this information with any exam guidance provided in the syllabus. (Remember that professors may alter their approach over time, so inferences from past exams—especially old ones—are just that: inferences. But they still represent a critical starting point.) Note in one column of your spreadsheet any information about the format of the exam, including open/closed note, in-class/take-home, time limits, types of questions, percentages, and word count.
- Review for model answers. Past exams are a fantastic resource for finals readiness—likely the best resource. But what truly makes them stand apart is the presence of model answers. Such answers are often the actual responses of students who took the exam in a given year, hand-picked by the professor to show what a strong exam answer looked like. Trouble is, not all profs provide model answers. Some may provide no guidance; others may provide “memos” written by the professor to the class noting what they wanted to see in a given response. The former is a challenge, the latter is better than nothing. The gold standard, though, is a model answer written by a student themself. (Remember, due to the infamous law school curve, just because a prior student received a top grade on the exam, that doesn’t mean it was perfect!) Put a column in your spreadsheet to note the presence of model answers. You’ll have to come back to this later depending on what information the column contains.
Weeks Three/Four:
A few weeks in, it’s time to revisit the exam bank and spreadsheet. You’re likely not ready to complete any practice exams just yet: exams typically touch on topics from throughout the semester, so you won’t have nearly enough law in your brain at this point to use these resources to test your mastery of the material. You also don’t want to read any exams start to finish just yet, as doing so could spoil elements of the exam for when you are eventually ready to practice.
That said, we DO want you to *scan* the exams for content. Rather than reading them start to finish, skim them to get a sense of the structure of the exam, the types of questions the professor is asking, and how they are asking them.
More specifically, we recommend trying the following, as applicable:
- Review multiple-choice questions (MCQs). If there are MCQs, pay attention to how many questions are being asked. Are there mini-hypos in advance of one or a group of questions? Read three or four questions to determine whether they seem to be testing your ability to apply doctrine (e.g., mini-hypos) and/or your conceptual understanding of points discussed over the semester (e.g., selecting an answer that most closely fits the definition of a legal, policy, or theoretical idea). It’s unlikely MCQs on a law school exam will be recall-based (e.g., “tell me what the defense argued in a given case”), but keep an eye out for that. Note your findings in an MCQ column of your spreadsheet.
- Analyze issue-spotters. This is where you want to be particular about just scanning: if you closely read the fact pattern of an issue-spotter at this point, it could spoil the exercise for you down the road when you actually know enough law to answer it; your future self will know the facts beforehand and therefore be in an unnaturally strong position to spot legal issues. Instead of diving into the story the professor tells to relate the facts, drop down to the very end of the question. You’re looking for the “call” of the question, where the professor instructs you on how to answer. What you want to determine is how much guidance they’re giving you in the call. Some professors give you very little: “Analyze all possible tort claims.” Note that in your spreadsheet; it’ll remind you that you’ll have to build your issue-spotting skills as well as your issue analysis skills. Other professors may generously direct your analysis and even spot issues. For instance, in Civil Procedure: “Analyze only the issues related to federal jurisdiction, noting arguments for plaintiff and defendant. Exclude any discussion of the theoretical or moral dimensions or implications of potential access to the federal courts.” In limiting the analysis to federal jurisdiction, the professor is spotting the issue; when it’s time to take the exam, you can read the fact pattern focusing only on that legal issue (ignoring the many others you learned that semester). They’re suggesting as well a structure for your answer: arguments for plaintiff and then arguments for defendant. Additionally, the second sentence tells you that the professor is looking for legal analysis only, and not policy/theoretical points that may have been raised over the semester. Note this in your spreadsheet. For those issue-spotters that spot the issue for you and where you’ve already covered that content in class, you may be in a position to take the practice question earlier in the semester. So note the content of the question in your spreadsheet as well, allowing you to work through specific questions as you complete sections of the syllabus.
- Uncover any policy/theory questions. Scanning the exam for these questions is helpful not only in directing your focus in readings and class, but also because it may allow you to get a jump-start on finals prep. Think about it: Unlike issue-spotters, having prior knowledge of the content of a policy/theory question won’t spoil your ability to answer it later. Similar to essay topics on college exams, the policy/theory question tests simply what argument you can make . . . not how quickly you can identify which argument to make. So read away with these types of questions! Start by distinguishing them from issue-spotters: Typically policy/theory questions will not have long, narrative fact patterns. Instead they usually present an argument or a position—e.g., a proposed piece of legislation; a legal scholar’s analysis of a point of law—and ask you to take a position one way or another on it. Similar to college essay exams, you must then generate a clear thesis, argue for your point, and do your best to elevate and eventually dispose of counterpoints. At the mid-semester scanning stage, you want to identify these questions and record the topics. So add another column to your spreadsheet. If you have multiple past exams with these questions, you may start to notice trends in question topics. Your heightened awareness of what you’ll be asked will then allow you to focus on those points throughout the semester, adding them to lecture notes and outlines accordingly.
Trust us, the semester will only get busier as the weeks wear on, and it will never feel like a “good time” to do this. Frontloading exam analysis early promotes efficiency not only because you’re working smarter when you have the time to do so, but because it can make the process of learning and studying much more focused.
What to do if you encounter exams without model answers? Worse yet, what about classes that have no past exams? Stay tuned for our next blog post for tips on how to navigate.