Pacing, grumbling, etc.

(I wrote most of the following a number of weeks ago.)

This past week was tough. But not as bad as the week before. In the past 2 weeks, most of the first year class has had 4 practice exams, since we're now a bit past halfway through the fall semester. We all have a total of 6 classes. Hmmm--it occurs to me that I don't think I've listed what classes I have. They are:

Contracts
Property
Criminal Law
Legal Research
Civil Procedure (basic mechanics of lawyering)
Torts (most of the lawsuit stuff you read about in the paper)

Practice exams don't affect your grade. I believe that the reason for this is that law professors want to do as little grading as possible, so they grade your midterms (in December), and your finals (in May), and assign you your grade solely on the basis of those 2 exams. In fact, the midterms in some classes don't even count for very much, which may be for the same reasons.

But since midterms are significant, and we haven't had any quizzes or homework in any classes (except our legal research class), profs for 1st year classes give us these practice exams, to help us know whether we've been understanding and integrating the material at a deep enough level.

So, those briefs that I mentioned earlier, as well as our class notes, are supposed to be reviewed. The general method of study that everyone learns about in law school (and many people follow), is to prepare an outline for each class. This means creating a Word document with an outline of all the material covered in the class so far. Depending on how much detail is put in (most students put in all salient points the prof mentioned), these outlines can run 50 pages or more by the end of the year. Other outlines summarize and leave out things and are shorter.

So, in preparing for these practice exams, all the 1L's (first year law students) have been spending long hours preparing these outlines by synthesizing their class notes with their briefs. Then, we read and reread the outlines we've prepared (and the ones we've gotten from other people) to prepare for the practice tests. This in addition to the regular reading and briefing we're supposed to be doing.

Practice exams are actually something nice that our school does for us, for our benefit. At a number of other law schools, the first exam that law students see is in December, which counts for up to half of their grade. But it still turns the pressure up another few notches.

So, that's the reason why the past 2 weeks were hard.