1L Exam Q&A Forum

[Hikikomorist]

.

[thesealocust]

Oh, what a scholar!

[Leonardo DiCaprio]

i sometimes sit in class and look around. and i try to see if i can guess who will be at the top after exams. my guess is the quiet dude who never says shit in class except every now and then to drop gems of scholarship.

also, today my profs confirmed that they want that IRAC format. I've seen CREAC thrown around TLS as well. but i think IRAC seems simpler

Maybe I'm just too dense and clueless to notice, but I can't recall anyone doing anything remotely like this in class. Everyone seems to stumble through cold calls with roughly the same level of success.

i don't know man. maybe my section just has torts savants or something. but fuck man, I'm really not getting that much out of class. like half the time the prof and the class just essentially talk about "well... what if this happened? where is the line now? how about if this other thing happened? does the line move?" fucking all 1L course is just different glosses of bu...but where do we draw the line!

Oh, what a scholar!

[thesealocust]

fucking all 1L course is just different glosses of bu...but where do we draw the line!

Congratulations, you figured it out early

[Leonardo DiCaprio]

are office hours helpful for exam purposes? i feel guilty for not going to any of them. wondering if profs drop gems of insight into exams during those times

[thesealocust]

Nah. If you have real questions or want to drop by sometime to talk exam content/strategy that's fine, but it's not mission critical, and doubly so this early.

[A. Nony Mouse]

If your prof will review mock exam answers in their office hours, then definitely do that - but closer to exams, not this early. (Some won't because they don't want to be deluged.)

[twenty]

Once you get closer to exam season, try and figure out how your professors award points. Do they have a checklist? Do they just give clever-sounding arguments a particular number of points? Will they get pissed if you straight-IRAC the hell out of everything? Do they want policy? Do they just want persuasive-sounding mumbo-jumbo?

That's why you should go to office hours. I was talking about transferred intent with my criminal law professor, and she subtly mentioned that an "A+ answer" would not only analyze both sides of an issue, but would also evaluate whether or not the reasoning supports the objectives of a functioning criminal justice system. Guess what, I wrote a bunch of policy into my exam and got the top grade. Another professor informed me she had no model answer and no checklist, and would basically award points to people who "argued the law persuasively, but like for your hypothetical client." I spent no time on counterarguments except to bring them up and then soundly defeat them, and made overly-strong conclusions. Also top grade.

The one class I didn't do this for (because I foolishly thought I could work with just past exams, and also because the professor kind of scared me at the time), I ended up with my worst grade of law school.

Moral of the story, a really good way to ensure that you get a medianish grade is to thoroughly know the black letter law, be able to apply said law to fact patterns, and have absolutely no idea what your professor wants going into the exam.

[anon180]

Good point about how it can vary by Prof. If you get ahold of the exams of students who sat their exams in the recent past, some have a sheet explaining it, others have red pen at least showing SOME logic. Other go the route of the bar examiners and just go "this is what you get, if you don't agree figure out on your own why not".

[BVest]

My civ pro prof (open-everything-but-internet exam), as we were leaving office hours and double checked the open-everything policy said "bring whatever you want, but really as long as you have you're rulebook you'll be fine." Sure enough, while there was one PJ question, the rest of the exam was pure FRCP, and as long as your rulebook was well-tabbed, you were in good shape. So occasionally the prof will tell you something in office hours that helps with the exam, but that's rare. And it certainly won't happen this far out. They haven't even started thinking about writing the exam yet.

[Leonardo DiCaprio]

id go to office hours but theres always a line of 5-6 1Ls outside his office. but glad to hear it's not mission critical at this point. i will just have to shamelessly show up towards the end of the semester and ask about exam content/strategy

[PeanutsNJam]

Once you get closer to exam season, try and figure out how your professors award points. Do they have a checklist? Do they just give clever-sounding arguments a particular number of points? Will they get pissed if you straight-IRAC the hell out of everything? Do they want policy? Do they just want persuasive-sounding mumbo-jumbo?

That's why you should go to office hours. I was talking about transferred intent with my criminal law professor, and she subtly mentioned that an "A+ answer" would not only analyze both sides of an issue, but would also evaluate whether or not the reasoning supports the objectives of a functioning criminal justice system. Guess what, I wrote a bunch of policy into my exam and got the top grade. Another professor informed me she had no model answer and no checklist, and would basically award points to people who "argued the law persuasively, but like for your hypothetical client." I spent no time on counterarguments except to bring them up and then soundly defeat them, and made overly-strong conclusions. Also top grade.

The one class I didn't do this for (because I foolishly thought I could work with just past exams, and also because the professor kind of scared me at the time), I ended up with my worst grade of law school.

Moral of the story, a really good way to ensure that you get a medianish grade is to thoroughly know the black letter law, be able to apply said law to fact patterns, and have absolutely no idea what your professor wants going into the exam.

Is it ok to shamelessly ask your professor "How would you grade this sample question?" or "What would the elements of an A+ answer be?", or is there some subtle way to go about doing this.

Also Hikko's "everyone seems to have similar success with cold calls" is credited in my experience as well.

[Attax]

i sometimes sit in class and look around. and i try to see if i can guess who will be at the top after exams. my guess is the quiet dude who never says shit in class except every now and then to drop gems of scholarship.

also, today my profs confirmed that they want that IRAC format. I've seen CREAC thrown around TLS as well. but i think IRAC seems simpler

It is funny that people say this. The gunneriest of gunners in my section transferred to H (idk why, probably because he likes debt and cares about the name).

CREAC = memo writing. Just IRAC the exam.

[twenty]

Is it ok to shamelessly ask your professor "How would you grade this sample question?" or "What would the elements of an A+ answer be?", or is there some subtle way to go about doing this.

Probably depends on your professor, but just be sure you're not wasting their time. "Do you have model answers for past exams?" "...Did you check the course materials page?" "Oh..." Most of mine were straight forward enough to where it didn't take a lot of guess work to figure out what the best plan was.

[Leonardo DiCaprio]

complete noob question, but in an outline is it critical to have the facts of a case? or will just the rule derived from it suffice

[Attax]

If it is a famous case, like Hairy hand, maybe a short blurb about facts, no longer than a line. Can help boost scores in analysis:

For example, compare the following two:
IRAC
CounterIRAC

This is a good start to an exam, but being able to Resolve Conflict between the two is even better. This is where things like policy arguments and comparisons to cases can help. You can add in the following so you get this:

IRAC
Counter-IRAC
Comparison to facts of another case that supports one of the outcomes.
Policy argument as to why one of the outcomes is more likely.

It can give you an additional justification beyond a policy argument (especially since you can make policy arguments for almost anyway) as to why an issue will resolve in a particular way.

[Leonardo DiCaprio]

merci attax!

[BVest]

I always preferred what you might call CIRA or CIRAC. I like stating my conclusion right out of the box and then explaining. With multiple issues it might be CIRAIRAIRA.

[twenty]

I always preferred what you might call CIRA or CIRAC. I like stating my conclusion right out of the box and then explaining. With multiple issues it might be CIRAIRAIRA.

I tried this as a 1L doing practice exams, but didn't love it. I'm kind of slow, and I often think of really killer counter arguments halfway through the analysis. Going back and changing the conclusion ended up being a time suck.

But obviously whatever works best for you, do that.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I always preferred what you might call CIRA or CIRAC. I like stating my conclusion right out of the box and then explaining. With multiple issues it might be CIRAIRAIRA.

I tried this as a 1L doing practice exams, but didn't love it. I'm kind of slow, and I often think of really killer counter arguments halfway through the analysis. Going back and changing the conclusion ended up being a time suck.

But obviously whatever works best for you, do that.

Yeah, this is why I think CREAC (and all the variations beginning with C) are better for writing assignments where you have the opportunity to go back and revise and add whatever you thought of along the way. If you can go back and stick the conclusion in the beginning of your exam answer, I think it can help the reader a lot, but most profs don't have high expectations for writing quality.

Semi-related, though, one thing is to make sure always to address the prompt, so if the prompt is "explain which party a court would find for" make sure to make that conclusion clear SOMEWHERE. Or if you get asked to advise whether client X has a claim/your firm should take the case/some other yes/no question. A lot are just "evaluate the claims in the following fact pattern" which is sort of indecisive, but if the prof wants an actual answer to a question, make sure to give it.

[BVest]

Oh, yeah, I'm talking about my structure, not necessarily the order in which I wrote it. I didn't always have my conclusion before I wrote (or I've gone back and changed it midway through), but I mean in terms of what I turn in. (If your conclusion is a straightforward single sentence, it's not hard to change if you change your mind during the analysis -- e.g. "The court should rule that there is personal jurisdiction in this case." If you change your mind, adding "not" is fairly easy. If you're handwriting, just always say "not" and then you can cross out the "not" later if necessary, or leave a blank, such as "The court should rule for the ______________," and fill in plaintiff/defendant later.)

Basically I always wanted to make sure that my answer to the question was clear so that if my analysis got muddled (as it often can on an exam), the prof wasn't reading through my drivel trying to figure out where I was going. This kind of goes along with Nony's aside above. Most of my profs wanted us to say who would win or something similar; some would ask for something less decisive like "What claims does X have? Analyze fully." Even then I'd try to start with something like "X has claims for assault, battery, false imprisonment, IIED, and negligence. The claims for assault, battery, and negligence are her strongest claims. [RA, RA, RA, etc.]"

[BNA]

A sincere thanks to everyone thaking the time to contribute here. These posts are silver bullets.

[ineedacupofcoffee]

How should you use a perfect outline you've received from someone else?

[BVest]

How should you use a perfect outline you've received from someone else?

I didn't ever use other outlines other than for cold calls, but if I were to do so, I'd treat it the way I treated my own: memorize it as much as possible both for content and order and tab it well. That way you know as much as possible, and if you forget something in the exam (assuming open book), you are able to turn to it in under 10 seconds.

[thesealocust]

How should you use a perfect outline you've received from someone else?

As a 1L, IMO only as a study tool after you've put in the work to create your own. Creating outlines is painful, tedious work - but it forces you to think through everything again, synthesize, organize, refine, etc. Once you've done that, reading through a good old outline can help you refine the one you made.

2L and on, you can skip class, do no reading, read your good old outline a few times, take it into the exam, and get an A