What am I supposed to be doing with one month left Forum

[resilience99]

I am a 1L. There is one month left in the semester, and I'm not sure how I should tackle this next month. Any tips or advice?

[stillwater]

sit down, take a deep breath, ask yourself WHY WHY WHY, then rollup your sleeves, find some quality upperclass outlines, find some practice exams, pore over the information, develop analytic frameworks, become fluent in the law and then drop the hammer of doom on your hapless classmates come exam time.

[shock259]

Do practice tests. Lots of tests.

[GouldGirl]

Now is the time to take many practice exams. But the thing about practice exams is that getting feedback that is tailored to your exact performance is difficult. Some professors will not give a practice exam more than a cursory once over if it all. And merely reading a practice exam model answer is not the same is a detailed edit with specific feedback to your strengths and weaknesses. There is a website that a guys runs that gives detailed feedback to any 1L exam. I used it and then re-wrote the exam and took it to office hours. Turns out his feedback was pretty legit and with it I was able to get a lot more feedback from the profs than had I gone in with my original draft. It was immensely helpful, I got awesome feedback from profs and ended up with an exam template based on my own performance. My main issue was organization and not only knowing what to write but how to write it. He really helps with that and graduated from a top 7 law school. When I sat down for exams I knew exactly how to organize my answer because I had done practice and got feedback that addressed my specific strengths and weaknesses. If you think you would benefit from detailed feedback shoot me an PM and I will forward info to you.
In any case take as many exam now as possible and GOOD LUCK!

[resilience99]

I am just curious what your daily study schedule was in the last few weeks?

[kykiske]

I am just curious what your daily study schedule was in the last few weeks?

I had pretty much abandoned taking down notes for class. I completely stopped briefing cases, and as a result, I didn't ace any cold-calls.

Instead, I started to really work on my outlines. At this point, I had 3 outlines up to date. And instead of taking down notes for class, I would just add the case to the relevant section in my outline, with the BLL and a one sentence fact description.

Then, around Thanksgiving, I sat down and started to condense all of the information, and started to make an attack outline. I made an important note to myself: keep the attack outlines short, no more than 10 pages each.

Then, during the study days, I used my updated attack outline and started doing practice problems, and worked on the professor's old exams.

I met with a study partner, and him and I would review the exam, and fine-tune our attack outlines for exam day.

And this may sound nuts, but the day before each exam, I stopped studying at 5 PM. I put my books away entirely. I went for a run, or caught up on a few episodes on Netflix, or played some Skyrim.

Then, I made sure to go to bed at a reasonable time.

Then, in the morning of each exam when I arrived at school, I found a secluded area, completely away from other law students, and read over my attack outline for that exam.

As a disclaimer, however, I have to say I felt like some of the exam grading really was a crap-shoot. I used this very methodical approach; one of my other friends spent two days cramming for the exam, and him and I got the exact same grade in the class.