Spring Grades

Spring grades are out, so my GPA is finally set in stone for ever and ever. I managed to give it a .01 bump in my last semester and finish with a nice round number. Excelsior!

Tax Policy Exam

My last (ever) exam was a barn burner. The Tax Policy professor asked some devilishly specific questions about readings that were assigned weeks ago. I reckon I handled it okay. Even if I didn't, this late in the game anything but an F qualifies as a success.

And that's that. The only thing standing between me and a juris doctorate is the formality of picking up my diploma.

Secured Transactions Exam

It was impossible to fully prepare for the Secured Transactions exam. We covered an absurd amount of material in the last fifteen weeks (UALR Law Student summed up the prevailing sentiment pithily at his blog). Add my complete lack of motivation to study here at the end of my 3L year, and I was expecting the worst.

It wasn't too bad. The essay portion of the test was exactly what the professor had told us to expect, so I think my answer was competent, if a little rushed. About an hour after the exam I remembered a statute that made part of my response dead wrong, but that shouldn't be enough to sink the whole essay.

The multiple choice questions worry me. They add an element of chance to an exam that I'm never comfortable with. Your typical law-school multiple choice question is about half a page long, and you only have to misread one word to botch the answer. Since half the points on the test came from the multiple choice questions, anything could happen.

Open Book

I have two exams this semester, and both are at least partly open book. Since I'm about to graduate and have a pretty casual attitude toward my grades, this open book business is a nuisance to me. For a closed-book exam, I would probably just read through my notes a few times and take my chances. With an open-book exam, expectations will be higher; now I feel like I have to spend time organizing my notes, writing cheat-sheets, putting tabs on things, and what-have-you. After the thousands of hours I've sunk into my legal education, these last few dozen feel like too much to ask.

Honored

Getting an A is good. Getting top paper is better. One has to take about thirty classes to get through law school, so one has a fair chance, if not a good chance, of coming away with at least one top paper. As I heard one student say, "everybody's a savant at something." After twenty-one bites at the apple, I finally found my something. In Decedents' Estates I scored my first top paper in a substantive law class.
Last night my fellow overachievers and I--fifty or sixty in all, somewhat undercutting the notion that we were the 'best of the best'--were feted with hors d'oeuvres and encouraging speeches. A good time was had by all.

Fall Grades

Fall grades are in. Mine were respectable. About six months ago I settled on a target GPA that I wanted to graduate with. I'm on a pace to beat that target, but I could still blow it with a poor showing in the spring. This is no time to slack off!

Decedents' Estates Exam

The lid is on my fall semester. The grand finale--the Decedents' Estates exam--was a horrible nightmare, but that doesn't mean much. I've taken three of this professor's exams, and they've all been horrible nightmares. It would be folly for me to try to predict my grade.

I will say this: I was very unnerved by the fact that I had to use a calculator to answer one of the questions. Lawyers, law students, and law professors hate math as a rule, so exam questions are usually formulated for minimum arithmetic. The fact that my answer did not come out in round, easy numbers is strong evidence that I did something wrong. I figure I lost some points there.

Federal Income Tax Exam

The Federal Income Tax exam is over and done with. It was comprehensive to be sure, but I think I had at least a plausible answer for every question. I won't flunk. Federal Income Tax was a bit like Business Associations for me: based on the course description, I assumed the worst, but the material turned out to be very interesting. I even registered for Tax Policy in the spring.

Also, it was a dirty trick for the administration to schedule an exam during the biggest basketball game of UALR's season. Shame!

Studying Without Outlines

This is the first semester that I haven't bothered to write outlines for any of my classes. I'm putting in lots of study time for finals, but I kind of miss the feeling of accomplishment and preparedness that comes from having one crisp document that lists all the things I learned in a semester. I guess I'm relying more than usual on luck this time around. It's a symptom of senioritis.

Summer Grades

Summer grades are out. Now that my GPA has the inertia of sixty-plus credit hours holding it in place, grade day isn't the event it used to be. Anyway, the infinitesimal move in my GPA was in the upward direction, so hurray for that.

Criminal Procedure Post Trial Exam

The Crim Pro exam was an odd duck. Hypothetical situations are the bread and butter of law school tests, but this one didn't go that route. I daresay it was the only test I have taken in the last two years on which all of the essay questions were essentially, "Remember this thing we studied in class? Write down what you know about it." There were also a great many multiple choice questions. In sum, the test seemed to favor whoever memorized the most stuff. I'll stand my memory up against anybody's, so I figure I did fine.

Advanced Torts and Speed-Writing

The Advanced Torts exam was a bruiser. It consisted of a four-page story with a cast of (by my count) sixteen characters, culminating in a mandate to discuss all causes of action, defenses, and remedies available to everyone involved. I don't think it was possible to write an A answer in the time allotted, so it's anyone's guess what the grades will look like.

I say it wasn't possible to cover everything in the three hours allotted, yet a few students turned in their tests and walked out with twenty minutes or more still on the clock. There are a few of these early birds at every exam, and it unnerves me every time. Do these people type 100 WPM? Are they regurgitating all-purpose essays that they memorized for the occasion? Do they just think faster than the rest of us? Don't they check their work? Most importantly, do they get good grades for those instant essays? The possibility that anyone is that much better at law school than I am is simply too horrible to contemplate.

Almost Ready for Finals

Over the last few days I've managed to boil a semester's worth of notes down to seven legal size sheets of paper. If I can learn everything you see here in the next thirty-six hours, exams should be a piece of cake.

Summer Session is Nearly Over

I'm trying to use the holiday weekend to belatedly start organizing my notes for summer exams. Have we really covered this much material in six weeks? This accelerated summer schedule is murder. I'm not sure I can get my act together in the three weeks between now and test time.

Spring Grades

I'll never get used to that long wait between exams and grades. As it turned out, I managed to repair a lot of the damage done by my disastrous fall semester. My B-minus in International Criminal Law goes a long way toward making up for any grades I've received in the past that I thought were unfairly low. A D would not have surprised me. My grades went up from there, so I have no complaints.
Now that I've turned things around, my poor academic showing last fall is sort of comforting to me. At least now I know that all the long hours I put in really are necessary to keep my grades up.

Business Associations Exam

The Business Associations exam was a week ago, but I've been hanging on to this post because there was a late make-up exam date and I didn't want to inadvertently tip my classmates to the exam's contents. Here's the low-down:

My grade on the Business Associations final will make or break my semester. It was the only four credit-hour class on my schedule, making it 25% of this semester's grades. I went into the exam in pretty bad shape. I was under the weather all weekend, so I lost a lot of valuable study time to NyQuil-induced naps. Fortunately, the professor went much easier on us than she might have. The bulk of the exam was short-answer questions that anyone who paid attention in class should have been able to answer.

The bad news with an exam like this is that the questions that were easy for me were probably easy for everyone. The professor can't give everyone As (that's just not the law school way), so the difference between an A and a C will probably come down to marginal differences in our responses to the essay questions. Did I remember only five factors of what was supposed to be a six-factor test? Did I forget to mention that Delaware courts apply some variation on the general rule? That kind of stuff could kill me.

One unusual aspect of this test that is worth mentioning: it was not timed. The exam started at 9:00 AM and ended when the last person left. We've all had the awful experience of remembering some key fact (that sixth factor, say) on the drive home from an exam, so it is hard to walk away from an untimed test. I stayed for four hours, and there were at least a dozen people still at work when I left.

International Criminal Law Exam

I just wrapped up my International Criminal Law exam, and it was God-awful. I didn't take this class seriously all semester, and I paid dearly for it. It wasn't that the questions were terribly hard. I just didn't know the material very well, so my answers were short and shallow.
I was one of the few students who regularly volunteered in this class, so I'll just have to hope the professor gives me a bump for class participation. A word about that: grading of exams is anonymous--the professor will just get a stack of exams with random numbers on them. However, when professors turn in their grades they can, if they choose, include a list of students whose grades are to be raised or lowered for attendance and class participation.

One Exam Left

This time tomorrow, it will all be over. It is awfully hard to work myself up to study for this last exam. International Criminal Law was my least favorite class this semester, and it was only two credit-hours. It's also an open-book exam, making it tempting to think that I can go in underprepared and look stuff up on the spot (never a good strategy).

So far, I've gone through my notes and typed up three pages of bullet points covering the highlights of the course. It's well short of the fourteen-page outline I brought into my Sales exam, but it's better than nothing.

Sales Exam

Today it was Sales Transactions. This was an open book exam. I've only experienced a couple of these, and I don't care for them. With all my books and notes in front of me, it's easy to get fastidious and waste time looking up niggling details when I should be painting in broad strokes and getting more material onto the page. I'm a pretty good memorizer, so closed book exams play more to my strengths.

I walked out of the Sales exam feeling pretty much the same way I felt after the Advanced Civ Pro exam: all the questions made sense to me, and I wrote a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean my answers were good.

One Exam Down

Advanced Civil Procedure was a pretty good way to start this semester's exams. That was the class with only four students in it, so we all studied hard all semester and had no reason to fear the final. Certainly the professor felt no need to pull his punches. The exam covered about two thirds of the course in one sprawling essay question (my response was just over 1100 words) and mopped up the rest of the course material in three shorter essays. I don't know if I gave the professor what he wanted, but I will say this: I had something to say about every question. I didn't write any wild guesses or filler. That's about the best I can hope for.
I should be preparing for my next exam, but I'm wiped out. I'll just have to put in an extra long day tomorrow.