Top Law Schools

I am a 2L and I am about to have my first ever take-home exam. Anyone have any tips/strategies? What should I be concentrating on given the longer time window and the fact that everyone obviously has improved access to information (how can I differentiate myself)?

lphat wrote:I am a 2L and I am about to have my first ever take-home exam. Anyone have any tips/strategies? What should I be concentrating on given the longer time window and the fact that everyone obviously has improved access to information (how can I differentiate myself)?

i read a bunch of old thread about this and the general consensus seems to be this:

prep as if its a regular in-class exam. everyone else will be taking for granted that they have 8 hours or whatever to do it...they wont prep for it properly. While they may finish on time and even spot the same issues, the person that was super prepared [liek prepared to do it in 3.5 hrs instead of 8] will have enough time to REALLY polish up the answer and add depth to the analysis.

leave a lot of time to edit..professors give take home exams because they don't want the crap that gets turned in from in-class exams. make it worth it.

somebody also suggested pre-writing your answers as you would for a normal exam because they said this would allow you more time to edit/polish

anyway so I'm a 1L and have 0 experience with this...I myself was trying to find tips on tls...the above is just what I read and decided to implement

What do you mean exactly by pre-writing your answers? I have a take home exam consisting of one issue spotter, one policy essay. Both have strict word limits. Any suggestions for those?

Man it would be difficult to pre-write wouldnt it? I guess you could pre-write important segment: like adverse possession requires: 1, 2,3 4

BCLS wrote:Man it would be difficult to pre-write wouldnt it? I guess you could pre-write important segment: like adverse possession requires: 1, 2,3 4

well...my take home is crim and I could tell certain things will be on the exam by the way she talked about them (and insisted on squeezing them in at the last minute) last class. So I will be drafting the initial setup of the discussion for those isses.

I actually did my outline for crim in paragraph and sentence format to make my life easier because I knew that our exam would be a take home and I wanted to be able to just type out of my outline and that actually really helped on my midterm in terms of saving time.I may do this for my civ pro outline and then create an index for easy reference to pages. That way there is no "predicting" involved in terms of which issues to prep for. I mean basically, how many topics are there in one class? not that many.

My fall-back option for civ pro if I dont have time to do that is to take all the practice questions Im doing and edit out the fact analysis and then use those as a guide to type from