Fastest Time to Learn Evidence Forum

[bonham887]

Please, no ridicule for my slacker habits, all I seek is advice:

Closed book Evidence MC exam, 10 days from today, have to balance that with studying for Bus. Assoc. (which I am somewhat okay for), can evidence essentially be learned from scratch in about a 4-5 day period. Thanks. Any tips, advice, anecdotes about learning evidence last second, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

[dixiecupdrinking]

I basically did this and came out okay. I mainly made sure that I had all the hearsay exceptions and confrontation clause stuff down pat, and figured (mostly correctly) that I could fake my way through most of the rest. I would say I nailed 2/3 of the test and flailed around and got a decent number of points on the last 1/3 (and also probably made a number of completely incorrect statements). YMMV depending on what your class/exam is like.

[Ersatz Haderach]

Are you in my Evidence class? I, too, have a closed book Evidence MC exam on that day, haha. And business associations afterwards.

Anyway - I'll be cramming the same way, and it'll be hearsay, hearsay, hearsay, and basically just doing a standard outline/review of the rest.

[Norwood]

yes you can. evidence is pretty straight forward. get a hold of a great outline and you can just memorize it in a day or 2. try out some multi-state bar questions on hearsay and character evidence to find the minor quirks and you'll be golden. good luck!

[morris248]

Evidence exam with model answers that might help

http://www.law-school-books.com/evidence-exam.html

[kalvano]

If it's a M/C exam, have the Siegels M/C and Essays Q&A overnighted to you. Amazing resource.

[wiseowl]

Make sure you know when extrinsic evidence can and can't be used for impeachment. That was the only thing I never got down and it killed me. Showed up in every fact pattern on the test.

[zeth006]

Favoriting this thread as I also basically have a week to teach myself Evidence. Got a good old outline and Siegel's supplement to use. Probably going to need to spend the first few days fixing the outline and memorizing it.


And yes, my exam is closed book too!

[zomginternets]

The most useful thing I did was to create an mnemonic acronym for hearsay exceptions. I'm guessing your class, like mine, spent close to a month on hearsay, so it's virtually guaranteed to come up on at least one essay exam and lots of MCs. As far as actually learning the exceptions, I found that the E&E explained it fairly well--at least well enough for you to BS your way through the exam.

[AreJay711]

Hmm, this thread reminded me to check if my evidence class was open book or not. I have no idea.

I'm going to be fucked if it is closed book.

[bonham887]

Exam is MC, closed book. The E&E has been very helpful so far. Not a huge fan of impeachment, those practice questions have been killer, well at least a fair few. Now just trying to memorize all the rules in the next two days before Thursday's exam. Thanks for all the help and good luck to other people taking evidence as well!

[kalvano]

I found this web site - http://www.invispress.com/law/evidence.html

The case briefs are super helpful if your professor wants you to cite support for whatever you say in the exam.