APimpNamedSlickback wrote:How do you folks suggest preparing for an 8 hour take home exam, as opposed to a 3 hour in class? I've got an all day property exam, and my outline captures all of the various splits in the law. Its pretty elaborate, and in fact I already know most of it cold.
So should i cull this unwieldy 80 page monster down a bit? Not really sure if you have enough time to really look at your materials during an 8 hour shindig. thanks yo.
In my experience, 8 hour take-home exams have a lot of extra time. You're pretty much safe just having a complete, yet unorganized, outline (just be able to access it in word and utilize "ctrl + F"). Again this has just been my experience, but I found that there was more than enough time to re-read sections of your outline when preparing an answer for the exam. Without having much of anything memorized (but having read through everything carefully), I would say an 8 hour exam took around 5-6 hours -- a lot of that time was spent just going back through everything on my outline and making sure I didn't miss anything. Another huge chunk of time was spent trying to figure out how to meet the brutal word count limit (mine were around 2,000 words). IMO, the best way to prep for a take-home exam (or really any open book exam with a strict word count limit that will leave you with a lot of extra time) is to just take a ton of practice exams and not really worry about memorizing much (because it's all going to come down to being able to write an extremely concise and good quality answer, as oppose to just vomiting a bunch of shit on the paper as quickly as possible).
