exams...what do you think about them?
"... exams play on a law student’s world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they’re at a distance, they serve merely to create the tension which swell daily like tides – to read, to keep pace, to understand. As exams draw close.... their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces...
( Scott Turow. One L. Warner Books, 1988 )
Check out the comment area to read the chapter.
Questions for Discussion:
Exams are a waste of time! All they measure is how good you are at memorizing things.
Exams are important. They test how well you take in information
and how you manage to interpret it and put it to use.
posted by eConnections @ 8:08 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
( adapted from Scott Turow. One L. Warner Books, 1988 )
Final exams play on a law student’s world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they’re at a distance, they serve merely to create the tension which swell daily like tides – to read, to keep pace, to understand. As exams draw close, however, in December and May, their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces.
When we came back after Thanksgiving, I could sense the exam mood taking hold. Many of the upperclassmen, the people who’d been through exams before, seemed to have returned from holiday with a pale, grim look. When they greeted each other in the hallways, most made jokes about how much better they’d feel in a month and a half. To a 1L, that was not a good sign.
We were all stopping each other now at lunch, in the hallways, to ask questions about cases and concepts we’d covered at the beginning of the term. And the study groups were growing more active. Some people preferred to work alone, either because they did not want to rely on others, or simply because they felt they learned better independently. But by now, most of the members of the section had found their way into groups, almost all of which were meeting a number of times every week to swap information and outlines and to work out past tests.
As we entered the last week of the term, right before Christmas, most of the students at the law school seemed to abandon any effort to maintain a brave front in the face of exams. The evidence of great apprehension was wide spread. Whenever I visited the library, there were long lines before each of the Xerox machines, as people waited to copy earlier editions of the red books or Law Review articles which were said to offer particularly trenchant digests of the material in various courses. Everybody around the school seemed to be fretting aloud that they would never catch up in their class work in time to make a thorough review.
For me, the anxieties showed in a spending spree on hornbooks, outlines, and prepared briefs. The purchase of study aids by all students was proceeding so briskly that one person has set up a sales counter outside the dinning hall; I was a particular willing customer. By the last week, I knew I had gathered more aids than I could possibly examine between then and the second week of January, but I could not resist my insecurities. Both the Torts and Criminal exams would be ‘ open book’, meaning that we could consult any printed source during the test. I was convinced that if I skipped the purchase of any one item it would prove to be crucial. I made a number of trips to a Harvard Square bookstore where legal study aids were stocked in shelf-high abundance, and on each occasion I bought something else. After all, I could sell it next year in the lawbook thrift shop. I must have spent close to $ 100 that way.
Classes are finished and everybody’s headed away for home and vacation. Wednesday Annette and I fly to Chicago, where we’ll spend the holidays with our families…
Christmas vacation at home. A few days of eating, drinking, seeing friends. A chance to be the fair-haired boy from Harvard.
Today I began to study for exams. I’ll do it five, six hours a day while we’re here, leave the mornings for sleep, the evenings for friends and family. I feel only mild and occasional pressure. For the most part I’m relaxed and whole. Away from the law school, I marvel at the frenzy of pressure and learning and intellectual stimulation in which I’ve been embroiled. The law, the law. I’ve probably not been as thoroughly taken by something since I hit puberty. Still, listening to the conversations of friends, it is hard to believe all I’ve missed while so absorbed: the football season, television shows, political doings, many recent movies. When people ask how we like the Boston area, I tell them to speak to Annette. I have seen only the two-mile stretch which runs from the law school to our apartment.
Happy New Year. Late this afternoon , we head back to Massachusetts. I felt the first threads of exam anxiety weaving through me last night and did not get much sleep. I’m trying not to study Torts, but I’m really too bleary to do much. I will be grateful if in the next couple weeks, I can keep myself under control.
Reviewing for law- school exams proved to be some of the most arduous study I’ve done in my life. Many of the 2Ls and 3 Ls who returned in January faced four or five exams. The 1Ls had only the two, but the job of getting ready still seemed staggering me. Between the two courses, we’d covered about 1,800 pages of cases, all if it dense reading and much of worth remembering. I also had taken over 500 pages of class notes, not to mention the hornbooks, outlines, and briefs, many of which I was actively consulting. Even on second encounter, none of that material was instantly comprehensible. There were many things I’d passed over or missed the first time which I felt I had to wrestle through now.
So I spent a lot of time – between 200 and 250 hours – preparing for those tests. When we got back to Massachusetts I put myself on a sixteen-hour-a-day schedule. There seemed no other way to cram all that material in. And after all the work I’d done throughout the term, this hardly seemed the time to cut corners. Annette did her best to ignore me. I sat in my study, making notes, poring over case books, or hornbooks, or notebooks.
The typical law-school test is what’s usually referred to as a an ‘issue spotter’. A long narrative is presented, involving a complicated serious of events and a number of actors. The exam generally instructs the student to put himself in the position of a law-firm associate who has been asked by a senior partner for a memo describing the legal issues raised.
Inevitably, the narrative has been constructed in such a way that its facts straddle the bounderies of dozens of legal categories. A varying interpretations of a single detail can produce a merlin-like change in the issues, and often the outcome of the case. For the student, the job is to sort quickly through the situation to try to name the endless skein of applicable rules and also to describe the implications of using one rule rather than another. Like a good lawyer, the student is expected to be able to argue sides of each choice.
I spend much of my time in early January bent over various commercial outlines doing a lot of straight memorization of rules. It was dull, unrewarding work and there was no way around it. Although I would have all the books beside me when I took the exams, time would be far too short to be looking things up then.
After I’d more or less learned by heart the rules in a subject area, I’d go back to my class notes and try to digest the specific policy rationales for the rules. Then, I’d see if I could relate those ideas to the broadest thematic concerns of each course. Holding all of it together in my mind was something of a feat.
As the exams grew closer we were all becoming tense. My sleep was fitful and a nervous sensation was constantly in my gut. I badly wanted to succeed and I sorely feared failing.
I paced and muttered and stared at my notes until ten o’clock, when I decided I should go to bed. The most important thing, I knew, was to get a good night’s sleep. During my first year of law school, my wife put up with a lot of excessive behavior from me. I worked too hard, slept too little. I was always up or down, at extremes.
When I went to bed I took a sleeping pill, and after some thought about how nervous I was, a few milligrams of Valium. I was certain that would do the trick. At midnight, I was still awake. I got up and had a drink. It didn’t seem to do much. A half hour later, I rose again to have more wine. This time Annette pulled herself out of bed to beg me not to drink again. I was going to kill myself with the pills and liquor, she said. I was going to be crazy with drugs in the morning. I went back to bed. We made love another time. Still no peace. At one-thirty, wild now with drugs and frustration, I rolled out and began to frail at the mattress: I was trying to destroy myself, I shouted; I was insuring failure; Annette quieted me and went to the living-room sofa so I could have the bed to myself. At two-thirty I got up to tell her to come back. She instructed me to go to sleep. Sometime after three, I finally did.
At around six-thirty Annette came in to dress for school and I woke to her stirrings. She kissed me good-bye and wished me good luck and then I got up. I felt horrible. I’d had about three hours’ sleep and now the sedatives had taken hold. I was cloudy and numb. My eyes ached and itched as if I’d tucked brambles under each lid. I poured five or six cups of coffee into myself, then, at eight, set off for school. I took my backpack full of books, and a thermos of coffee. I was still dizzy and spaced out as I rode down Massachusetts Avenue on the bus, and I thought vaguely that I was doomed.
Scott Turow, One L. Warner Books, 1988
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