This title
was recommended to all of us bloggers as a topic that would be appropriate for
this time of the year, and it may well be because a checklist is one of the
most valuable documents a law student can create in preparing for a final
exam.
Let me
preface: finals are a bit terrifying. In
your first year, most classes like Property, Torts, Contracts, and Civil
Procedure are 5 units and they are required to have a mid-term exam, which
counts for somewhere between 15-25% of your final grade. It’s meant to give you an idea of how you’re
doing and where you might need to improve your understanding of the material or
hone your exam-taking skills. But that
still leaves 75-85% of your grade to the final exam. With subsequent courses, the final exam is
often 100% of your grade. And grades
matter in law school. They really
matter. Employers select interviewees
based on grades. Big Law partners
mention Order of the Coif on their webpage 30 years after graduation. So you want to do the best you can on your
finals.
One of the
best techniques for doing well on a final exam is to create a checklist. I did this for Contracts my first year, and
it made all the difference. A typical
law school exam will have a fact pattern, a little story where the characters
have legal problems with each other, and it’s your job to “IRAC”: spot the Issues, state the Rule, Apply the
rule, and come to a Conclusion. (IRAC is
an acronym you’ll hear tossed around all the time in law school.) When reading through a fact pattern, I like
to make notes as soon as I spot an issue or possible issue – sometimes it’s a
red herring. Some issues jump out right
away and it’s easy to dive into those and begin your analysis. But inevitably, there are other issues that
are not so obvious, and that’s when it’s good to have a checklist. Generally speaking, the professors are going
to test you on all the material they covered during the course of the semester
or the year. A 5 unit class will have
about 70 hours of lecture. That is going
to be A LOT of material, so having a checklist can be really useful.