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I was pretty fortunate last year in that almost all of my professors had available old exams. This year, not so much. Is it better not to practice with exams from other profs / schools, or is it still good studying?

yes, practice with other schools/professors.
And notice when the questions are irrelevant to what you learned and skip them.

Another good tip is that if old bar exams/answers for your state are available to practice with them. That is your ultimate goal anyway, to pass the bar.

I think the benefit of practice exams is training yourself to spot issues. After 1L, I don't think you should need that training anymore. (But of course, you are the best judge of what you need.) The only benefit I found for 2L/3L practice exams (when available from prof) was to see what topics the prof liked and how the exam was structured. After 1L, I didn't do any practice exams for classes when the prof didn't make them available. I think it would be unnecessary.

So I vote "no."

But I guess it depends on the situation. For example, if your evidence prof will be doing MC questions, I would probably practice on some MBE evidence questions.

ggocat wrote:I think the benefit of practice exams is training yourself to spot issues. After 1L, I don't think you should need that training anymore. The only benefit I found for 2L/3L practice exams (when available from prof) was to see what topics the prof liked and how the exam was structured. After 1L, I didn't do any practice exams for classes when the prof didn't make them available. I think it would be unnecessary.

So I vote "no."

Hmmm. I completely disagree.
For me, the main purpose of practice exams was to get used to thinking about the material in real circumstances, especially how it worked together as a whole, and mapping out what an answer would look like. (Ex. in contracts, start with offer and acceptance, and move through consideration and other validity issues up to remedies.)
So I plan to use practice exams as my main study tool in 2L and 3L as well.

Yeah, I use the practice exams to sort of wrap my head around the issues and see how best to bring them out in exam format.