I put off writing about the exams for a long time because I didn't want to think about them. And not because I felt terrible about my performances, but because everything about exams and grades is so mysterious that it was stressful just contemplating the work I had just done. Because of the bell curve, my grades will only demonstrate my performance relative to everyone else in my classes, and since I can't possibly know or even reliably guess how well they did... well, you see where this is headed.
Because it's been 17 days since my last exam, and because just this morning I checked the registrar's website and received my first grade, it's time for me to belatedly make a few notes about those exams.
As the last post discussed, time is often in short supply on law school exams. Only two professors gave any guidance on how long our answers should have been, but we were able to get a general sense based on some past student answers that the professors provided us. Surprisingly, the time/word ratio varied considerably in my four exams:
Torts: No specific guidance on length given by the prof. We had four hours and only one question to answer, and because of this, I felt the most comfortable about this exam afterwards. I managed about 3100 words in 4 hours.
Civ Pro: For this 3 1/2 hour exam, the prof gave a maximum word limit of 6000. My pace was terrible, and I got really far behind by the third and final question. I walked out of this exam feeling really bad -- I think my answers to all three questions might have been 2400 words total.
Con Law: Two questions: an open-ended essay question ("What do you think about Constitutional issue x and why?") worth one-third, and an issue-spotter/hypothetical case question worth two-thirds. Three hours. Previous student responses averaged around 1000+ words for question 1 and 2000+ words for question 2. As with the Civ Pro exam, I really fucked up my pace on this exam and had to write really fast at the end. I wrote the issue-spotter first, and felt pretty good about my answer (circa 2300 words), but did not feel good about my 450-word response to the essay question.
Contracts: Three questions, 3 hours and 20 minutes. The best part was the word limit: Prof. Tambor suggested "about 500 words" per response. However, it wasn't as easy as that might suggest, because the facts were pretty detailed for all three hypotheticals and it's harder to process three distinct questions of contract law back-to-back-to-back than for another topic, because contract law has so many different elements that it can seem like completely different subjects, at times.
In any case, I felt OK about the Contracts exam afterwards, but still a bit rushed. Needless to say, I did not proofread or revise in any of my exams: there's no time to do that.
Predictions:
With the above caviats about the impossibility of predicting one's exam results, here are my best guesses. I've used three separate categories for analyzing how well I did in the class: My general feeling of how well I knew the material during the semester; my analysis of how well I prepared; and my feeling a couple hours after the exam. (I made these predictions before knowing the grades; since then, I've added the actual grades in bold, and left the predictions unchanged.)
TORTS: During semester: 7/10; Quality of exam prep: 7/10; Post-exam feeling: 8-9/10.
Best guess for my grade: A-, A, or B+. I would be really pissed with a low grade in this class, because I feel like I demonstrated that I knew the material really well. If this grade is bad, I'd feel really discouraged about the prospect of ever getting good grades.
That last sentence presciently sums it up. Actual final grade: C+
CIV PRO: During semester: 5/10; Quality of exam prep: 8/10; Post-exam feeling: 4/10.
Best guess for my grade: B-, B, maybe B+ if I'm lucky. This was a bad exam experience -- I feel like I know the material (and that I knew it on exam day), but my answer to the third question was really rushed. Best case scenario is that my first two answers were first-rate, and that the third one doesn't pull me down too far. But if I had to bet on my worst grade, this would be it.
Actual final grade: C
CON LAW: During semester: 5/10; Quality of exam prep: 5/10; Post-exam feeling: 6/10.
Best guess for my grade: B/B+. I wouldn't be shocked by an A-, because I felt like my issue-spotter answer was really good. But my essay was rushed and didn't really have a conclusion, and I'd be surprised if that third of the grade was higher than B-, and possibly lower. In all honestly, B or B+ would both be fair grades for my performance in the class. I suspect that a lot of the students had learned Supreme Court cases in detail in poly-sci or pre-law classes already, and although I felt comfortable with my level of knowledge in the class, I knew from class discussion that there were a lot of students who knew the New Deal cases like the backs of their hands.
Actual final grade: C+
Lawyering: No exam, just our memos (20% and 70%) and class participation (10%). I'd be disappointed with anything less than A- in this class. I know that I got 20/20 on the first memo, and have no reason to suspect that I didn't earn all 10 points for participation. As with Torts, if I got a bad grade here, I'd be really discouraged.
Actual final grade: B
Finally, I logged onto the registrar's website to discover -- to my surprise -- that my grade for Contracts is in, and that it is A-. Because Contracts was my last exam of the semester, I didn't think about it afterwards like I did for the other three, and so I didn't write down any formal predictions. I'm definitely pleasantly surprised with the A-: I probably would have guessed B+, B, and A-, in that order. We have been given a lot of conflicting information about when grades will be available, but the consensus seems to be that they will trickle in over the next three weeks, and that at the beginning of February we will get a class ranking. (Which will be somewhat less dramatic, because the curved grades for each class ensures that everyone has at least a general understanding of his/her position in relation to everyone else.)
First semester GPA: 2.687, which is almost exactly a B-minus average.
