Thank you! I annotated a bunch of cases (I do this instead of briefing, since it's much faster), and outlined my long memo today. I know how you feel.

Someone on TLS wrote their exams by hand and got decent grades, right?

It's physically impossible to write as fast as you can type. Seriously - start practicing typing and get your machine ready in advance. After a dozen+ weeks of preparation, hundreds of pages of reading, dozens to hundreds of pages of outlining, dozens of books, hundreds of class hours - why would you not give yourself every advantage when it comes to taking the exam?



Given the theoretical upper limits of typing and hand writing, the fact that one wouldn't type as fast as they write means it's time to fucking learn to type, not chose to hand write the exam.

I'd be shocked if you could break 30 WPM hand writing, and I know people who can burst 100 WPM typing.

Typing faster = more time on the exam. That's how you need to be looking at it.

I took all of my 1L exams handwritten in bluebooks and did just fine. A's and B's. Handwriting has the advantage of slowing you down. While others here think that speed is the key, and that dumping as much info on the page in the time alloted is best, I would argue that most profs. basically want one thing: answer the question. You will have plenty of time think through the question, formulate a well organized answer, and write it in the book. Don't worry, law students have been succsesfully taking handwritten exams for hundreds of years.

Oh, it is important to write legibly. I also double-space.

Another advantage, at least at my school, is that far fewer people handwrite. This is nice because the writers take their exams in a different room than the typers, and since there are so few of us - a half dozen or so - you can spread out your materials (especially helpful for open book/open note) Also, you don't have to listen to 35 other people tapping away on keyboards. It's just a more relaxed atmosphere.

And you don't have to worry about your machine crashing. Just bring an extra pen and some wite-out tape.

This is just wrong on so many levels... can you do fine handwriting? Yes. But it's slower. You're making the mistake that advocates of typing speed are advocates for answer length. That's not necessarily true at all - if I type 75 WPM and you write 25, then I have way more options. It will take you 10 minutes to write a page of text, it will take me just over 3. I can spend 5 minutes planning and 5 minutes writing. It's just one example, but you need to not think that the purpose of typing is to 'dump more information on to the page'. You have to think of it as getting extra time on the exam, because that's exactly what it is.

Another point: While many exams can theoretically be answered sufficiently at the pace of hand writing, some are real 'race horse' type issue spotters. The more total issues, the more important it will be to write as much clear analysis as possible.

Typing speed is just a tool - being able to put more words on paper in a faster pace does NOT make them lower quality or impede your ability to think on its own. Likewise, the fact that some people done alright handwriting their exams is like saying your grandmother lived to be 95 smoking a pack a day.

Maximize your potential!

Appeal to Authority:

Arrow is among my favorite people on TLS. After everything he's done, and all he's given us, he's so humble.

I will seek him out. Thank you for the informative answers.

FTR, I adore writing and editing, but if I've ever typed above 50 wpm in my life, I'd be very surprised. I'm thorough, but not fast. Is it really worth practicing my typing?

I think it might be worth it in your case; I am contemplating taking a typing refresher and I type 65-75 wmp...

In any exam where it follows the basic 'issue spotter' format, I think it's complete insanity not to type. In those exams, the actual 'spotting of the issue' is usually the most important factor and many profs design their exams such that you will have barely enough/not enough time to really flesh everything out as it is. When I visited Pitt before I started law school (my gf at the time went there) they had this dude speaking who wrote some weird book about law school exam taking. He really emphasized that with law school exams at least half the battle is good time management. If you're handwriting, you likely have less time to manage AND at some point over a 4 hour or so exam fatigue is likely to be a factor.

I don't think editing is THAT big a deal primarily because I've rarely had enough time to really edit everything after the fact. The bigger deal in my opinion is that in questions with sub-parts you might find yourself wanting to do things not in order. If you didn't want to do whole questions not in order, you could probably just use separate bluebooks, but it could be annoying (and you'd have a pile of bluebooks to organize) if you did that for sub parts of questions. I think it's just another thing you don't want to have to deal with. But yeah, if you are a big editing person, that would be another reason not to hand write. Some people advocate writing an outline before writing the actual answer, but I've rarely had time to write one of any detail that was beyond just a list of issues to make sure I hit.

There are certain cases where I think it would be BEYOND complete insanity not to type.

a) any exam where a maximum word count is specified. how you would ever know you're at/below the correct word count I have no idea.
b) any torts exam.
c) you don't have PERFECT handwriting.

Here's another thing to consider. I've found exams overall to be a weird game where you have to manage the whole exam period. I know people who were seriously put off because they did poorly in one exam (or so they thought) and it affected their preparation for other exams. If the whole hand writing thing turns out to be a disaster, it might screw you beyond just the exam you try it out on. Additionally, if you do poorly, you don't want to sit there thinking "could it have been different if I typed it out?" Yes....1L law school exams ARE that important.

About hand writing your notes: SOME profs (at least at Michigan) let you take exams where your laptop is 'unblocked.' What that means is that you can look up other documents on your computer (not the internet). Being able to Ctrl-F through an outline to find stuff instantly can be a god-send.

AP, thanks for the super detailed response. Your experience with taking exams unblocked makes me want to type up my outlines ASAP. I'll be aiming for best long memo in my LRW section, to compensate for shortcomings of typing speed. That thing I can spend 100 hours on. For the first one, the 14 hours I spent on five pages (not including research) turned out to be worth it.

I supposed I'd better go ahead and register for the damn thing. My only lingering thought is to ask my professor what he recommends. If he tells me to type, I'll do it.

I actually do this weird thing where I have my outlines printed and tabbed (so much that they look like porcupines) AND have them on the computer for the searching feature. If you're good with an outline you can just reference quickly, that's probably fine too.

I've heard this story where folks say that 'you don't have time to look up stuff on outlines' but I personally haven't found that to be true. On the other hand, I have a memory that's for shit.