Law School Exams

Oi. Exams in law school are something of a bitch, which I'm sure many who read this blog already know. Seriously. You study your ass off for a whole semester, take a few hundred pages of notes, read and brief a few hundred cases spend countless hours making sure that you grok the law in its entirety, but your grade for the class comes down to a single 2-4 hour test. Seems to me that these tests are less an evaluation of how well you understand the material (though you'd better have a good grasp of it or else you'll spend the whole exam just looking stuff up) and more an evaluation of how fast you can compose a broad essay that fits in as many different points of law as possible. Sure the profs tell you that all you really need to do is answer the question, but from what everyone else tells you, doing that is what you do to get the passing grade. Getting the high marks requires you to answer the question AND throw in everything else that is even remotely related.

Then, as my torts prof said, exam grades are entirely artificial and arbitrary. You either write down what the prof wants to see or you don't. The argument/answer itself is not so important so long as the correct topics were mentioned and understanding was demonstrated. I'm sure that the theory goes something like "if the students know the material well enough, the issues will be obvious" but honestly, the sort of time pressure we're put under makes it nigh impossible to address any given point with any sort of real nuance or depth without sacrificing the same on other questions, and (at least for me), knowing the true depth and nuance of the law almost seems a detriment because it is so very easy to get caught up in one explanation and then not have time to adequately address the other points (yeah, sure, the answer is better time management, but that only works if you remember to look at your watch). Anyway, time management aside, I question whether these exams are really an efficient evaluation method. Seems to me that because there simply isn't enough time to really show the prof what one has learned, there probably won't be all that much difference between the exam written by a student who really knows the law in all of its complexity and that of a student who only knows the basics. I dunno, I haven't gotten my grades yet, so I'll stop kvetching for now and get back to you once I've seen how things went.