Ready...set...write!

An objective professional journalist would have a lot to report during the time of law school exams. However, the blogger in the midst of exam preparation has little time to report, or to do much of anything besides study. As a brief respite from studying, I will spend a little while describing what's going on right now.

A standard law school exam is comprised of approximately 1-3 essay questions over the course of 3-4 hours. Although books on law school seemed to indicate that exams were almost always open-book/open-note, three of my four exams are closed-book/no-notes. Almost everyone takes the exam on a laptop, using software that disables all functions except the exam software -- essentially turning the computer into a bare-bones word processor. And then you type like crazy in response to the questions.

The questions are based on "fact patterns" -- hypothetical scenarios that raise issues of law that the students are supposed to identify and respond to. These scenarios get pretty elaborate and wacky because they're supposed to encompass everything (or almost everything) we've learned in the course. So in a torts problem, Person A will be assaulted and battered by Person B, who will slip and fall on icy steps, and will be a victim of medical malpractice at the hospital, and will then be subjected to harassment by Person A while recovering at home. And we have to analyze (argue the rules of) those claims.

I've seen several practice questions and although the torts problems seem relatively straightforward (though not to say "easy"), the fact patterns for Civil Procedure are often extremely complicated. For me, it is much easier to picture a series of car crashes, broken arms, and shouting matches than it is to imagine corporations in four different states with varying claims about a non-compete clause. It's obviously important to understand the more abstract and intangible concepts that make the world function, but it is not always easy to process them in a limited amount of time. But that's what we have to do.

How much time do we get to think about each question? There are no specific rules, and there is no minimum word-count, but I'm worried by the examples I've seen. A couple of the teachers have provided past exams and samples of "good answers." For a two-question exam in Con Law, one "good answer" was 4000 words; the other was 5000. Our Civ Pro teacher gave us a maximum word limit of 6000. Who are these people that write 6000 words in three hours (500 words every fifteen minutes!)? It would be hard to write a free-associative blog post at that pace, much less an exam about highly technical material that I've memorized and applied to a brand new and intentionally tricky fact pattern. I know -- as a former writing teacher -- that it's not the quantity that counts, but I also know that a teacher is at least subconsciously impressed by a student who can demonstrate a thorough grasp of detail, even when that detail is not completely on point.

There's much more to say, but no time to say it. The word count of this post is 542 words, and it took 30 minutes to write. Can I do that ten times in three hours? I'll tell you after December 20.