What Are Law School Exams All About?
Well, 1L ended in a strange and unusual way, to say the least…from online lectures to online moot competitions and, of course, completing online exams, the end of 1L required many adjustments both personally and academically. With that said, I’m grateful that I maintained my health and was able to successfully complete the year from the comfort of my home.
After completing 1L, I feel confident enough to share with our readers what it is like to do an Ontario law school exam. This week, I’ll share my experiences with law school exams, including how law exams work, how I studied, and of course, cap it off with a few tips and tricks that I learned to benefit my success.
How do law school exams work?
The exams that I encountered in 1L were either multiple choice closed book exams or short and long answer question open book exams consisting of hypothetical scenarios requiring legal action pertaining to certain areas of law (I’ll expand on what means, I promise). Approaching a closed book multiple-choice law school exam resembles an undergrad multiple-choice exam. It requires learning or, more commonly, memorizing the material in the format that works best for you. The key to succeeding in close book exams is to understand what forms of studying work best for you and implementing these tactics to the next level of education. Overall, I found the multiple-choice exams to be a more manageable format as it felt familiar and easy to follow. The written exams were not quite as straightforward.
The majority of my 1L exams were in this latter format consisting of short and long answer questions. Short answers usually pertained to one area or rule of law that applied to a fact pattern. Fact patterns/hypos/hypotheticals/fact scenarios are the various terms used to describe how legal issues are presented in Law school exam questions. These fact patterns are usually quite longwinded and give rise to multiple issues requiring legal action in their respective areas of law, whether it be property, contracts, or constitution/charter related.
The goal of answering these questions is to spot all the issues within the fact pattern to determine how to solve these issues using the appropriate legal principles. These answers usually require a lot of preparation of class and case notes along with outlines to help guide your answers on exam day, which tends to take up a lot of your study time.
How I Studied
The first obstacle I faced when it came time to start studying for exams was how to go about studying for law school exams? It was at that moment that I realized I had no clue! Of course, the first thing I did was reach out to my classmates and upper-year students for some guidance and insight into how they were approaching this overwhelming task. The general consensus was to go through class and textbook notes, ensuring I had a grasp on important takeaways from each case. But, more importantly, know how to navigate the documents I created, which contained “case briefs,” important takeaways, and important areas of law to be applied in the fact scenarios. After creating these documents, I spent much of the exam study period with Law School Life & Beyond’s in-house Brainiac, Joey! Together we went through the course material to become familiar with all aspects of our courses before entering the exam. Lastly and probably most importantly, we went through practice fact patterns from exams of past years. At Windsor Law, these past exams can be found on the law library website. The importance of going through these fact patterns is to familiarize yourself with the types of questions you may find on exam day and gain the confidence needed for when the time to write the real exam arrives.
A few tips and tricks that I found to benefit my learning
Now that I’ve endured two rounds of law school exams, I want to provide a few tips for studying that I have found to work well for me. First off, I highly recommend creating a study group. The opportunity to discuss the material with classmates was so beneficial for me as we were able to bounce ideas off of each other, receive more comprehensible explanations to difficult concepts, and of course, hear each other’s perspectives on the various topics covered. The bottom line is, become friends with your classmates; they were my best and most accessible resources.
Another recommendation I can make is to use the resources the school and modern technology has provided for us through Westlaw, LexisNexis, and even a simple Google search. I found some of the cases covered in class and readings to be challenging to comprehend at times as they were full of legal jargon that had me extremely confused. To overcome these challenges, I commonly would look up case summaries through the resources listed above that simplified these cases and their important takeaways to ensure no key information was missed. Both of these tips are only suggestions that I found to work well for my study group and me, so try them out but remember everyone has their own techniques that work best for them.
I hope this post was able to give you some insight into some of the mysteries surrounding law school exams, but remember if there is any stone I’ve left unturned, feel free to reach out to anyone on the Law School Life & Beyond team to answer any of those questions!
