5 Tips for Your Law School Exams

I used to struggle with exams. Not just law school exams, but exams in general. I would get so much anxiety from it.

I failed 8 classes in law, but by my last semester, I got 3 High Distinctions (HD’s). In my very last law school exam, I got an HD, and I’m going to share the tips that helped me.

This blog post has 5 tips for your law school exams.

There are two sections to this blog post:

Exam Preparation throughout the semester

&

What to do 3 weeks before your exam

Let’s dive in.

Exam Preparation

1 – Exam notes as you go

A game changer is definitely doing your exam notes as you go throughout the semester.

Here’s how it works. Every single week you:

1. Do readings for the week
2. Watch/attend the lectures for the week
3. Attend the class for the week
4. Make your exam notes based on everything you have learned for the week.

This only takes an extra 30 minutes to an hour each week. It may seem like a lot, but think about this – you are already putting in a lot of hours to your studies, what’s an extra 30 minutes?

The reason why this will help you so much is that the timeframe between your last class and your last exam isn’t that much.

If you’ve got your exam notes ready to go, you can focus on reviewing and revising the concepts you need to work on the most. You don’t need to worry about creating exam notes anymore.

2 – Rate the difficulty of the topic at the end of every week

All you do here is at the end of every week, after you’ve done the above, you rate the level of difficulty.

I preferred to rate it from a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most difficult and 1 being the least. By the end of the semester, it would look a little bit like this:

• Week 1 – 2
• Week 2 – 3
• Week 4 – 3
• Week 5 – 4
• Week 6 – 5
• Week 7 – 5
• Week 8 – 2

and so on…

Then, once it’s the few weeks leading up to your exam, you can first focus on the concepts that have the highest level of difficulty.

Referring to the example above, you would focus first on the week’s content that has been rated 5 (weeks 6 & 7). Then, you can work your way to the 4’s and then the 3’s and so on.

3 Weeks Before

3 – Create a Scheduled Plan

This is where Tip 2 (rate level of difficulty) will be your best friend.

You need to create a plan for what you’ll be tackling each day leading up to the exam.

As an example, here’s what it would look like:

• Monday: Tackle Week 6 content (5 in the level of difficulty)
• Tuesday: Tackle Week 7 content (5 in the level of difficulty)
• Wednesday: Tackle the content rated 4 in the level of difficulty
• Thursday: Continued
• Friday: Tackle the content rated 3 in the level of difficulty
• Saturday: Break
• Sunday afternoon only: Tackle the content rated 1-2 in the level of difficulty.
• Monday: Review concepts still not understood
• Tuesday: Continued
• Wednesday: Final revisions

When you do this, it’ll be a longer plan. Hopefully, this gave you an idea of how it works.

4 – Review each topic by level of difficulty (from Tip 2)

Continuing from the previous point, the first exam preparation you want to do is the most difficult topics rated (from Tip 2). Hopefully, it’s also already integrated into your study plan.

5 – Make sure you know instantly where to find the answers.

The thing with open-book exams is that you don’t have all the time in the world to find the answers.

That’s why, in the weeks leading up to your exam, make sure that all your exam notes are organised in a way that you know where to find them.

For example, I added a table of contents to my exam notes so I can instantly turn to the page of the topic the questions are about.

That’s why it’s also helpful to have separate notes for legislation and cases. The more organised you are, the easier it’ll be once you head into the exam.

You don’t want to spend most of the exam trying to find the answer. You want to spend time in the exam writing a great answer. Truthfully, you only want to spend 5-10 minutes finding the concepts in your notes, and then spend the rest of the time writing.

To Wrap Up

Overall, these are the tips to smash your law school exams:

1. Exam Notes as you Go (Exam Preparation)
2. Rate topic by level of difficulty (Exam Preparation)
3. Create a scheduled plan 3 weeks leading up to the exam
4. Review topics by level of difficulty
5. Make sure you know where to find the answers

When you do law school exams, you want to make life as easy for you as possible. Doing the exam preparation, planning, and being strategic with your review can help make life easier (even if you still feel stressed). When you’re not organised and you don’t plan ahead of time, it’ll feel more stressful.

If you want more law school tips, you can check out the law school blog here and also my Instagram.

Good luck with your exam preparation!

-Lauren 🙂

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