11.7.24 - Studying for exams (response to email}
Re: Question
Dear mister [redacted],
Thank you for your email, and I appreciate your kind words on my earlier posts. I am glad I wrote them and shared them, because I’ve gotten a lot of messages on Reddit that they were helpful (as well as people who thought I was a douche)——which I wasn’t necessarily expecting!
So, first, a disclaimer, I’m a complete bozo and how I do things may not be good for everyone. I’m also woefully behind in the readings for one of my classes this semester (having too much fun), so I’m also not the paragon of academic discipline. However, since I did do well on exams 1L, I am happy to share my thoughts:
I think you study for closed book exams and open book exams mostly the same.
I mentioned this because you specified “closed book final” in your email. The fact is, for any exam you should be able to do it with minimal external support, and for any exam you should make something like an outline. For me, nothing about how I study for closed or open book is vastly different.
On the contrary, some people do make “CMD+F” outlines for open-book exams specifically designed for searchability. A friend of mine got an A+ in a hard class doing this. But I don’t do this, and don’t use any digital files on my finals at all, so I can’t speak to it.
So what do I do? For every class I make a really pretty outline, that makes the doctrine really clear in my head. But I’ve already written about that.
Often I will write out explainers for myself, literally written like I’m writing right now, very conversational, where I’m sort of giving a lecture to myself and walking through concepts. I did this for CIV PRO, which was open-book for me, and it helped a lot (and I actually use these lectures for tutoring now). Explaining things is one of the best ways to learn them, in my opinion, and being able to explain things with no outside reference is a central skill for closed book exams.
So I guess, if I had any advice that maybe is different than what you could find ANYWHERE (outline early, do practice problem, etc.), is to get things down to a level where you could explain them to a stranger. You should feel confident so that if someone asked you about say, what subject matter jurisdiction is and how it works, that you could draw it all out from scratch for them.
Why does this help on closed book exams? Well think about this, every exam stem essentially asks you to explain something (e.g. you’re a law clerk writing a memo for a judge, you’re an associate writing an email to a partner, you’re a lawyer writing an email to a client). So getting good at explanatory talking and writing is helpful, in my view. And the professor is checking if you get things, so getting good at showing you understand them via explanation is a good habit to get into.
How did I do this? I was very annoying to my classmates, who were often patient enough to let me give them little lectures with whiteboards, punctuated by a lot of “does that make sense?” And I also bug my girlfriend a lot and try and tell her things she doesn’t care about.
Now you might say, how can I explain them if I don’t UNDERSTAND it in the first place? Good question. But it’s only when you try and explain things that you realize what you can’t articulate quite right. Sometimes you feel like you know something, but you actually cannot verbalize it. And sometimes you feel like you don’t, but then you find out you know enough to sort of impart it to a stranger. (Could you explain personal jurisdiction to your mom? Probably!). So explaining is critical to even understanding what you need to understand better!
So, it’s one of those things where you don’t need to spend too much time getting an understanding, because the fact is you won’t ever understand everything about anything. You’ll enter the exam with a few areas where it’s a little bit fuzzy. And in real life, that fuzziness persists in the law, and that’s why doctrine gets go garbled even by Supreme Court justices. And the exam hypos you get will be fuzzy, and can usually swing both ways. The fact that judges often disagree and get things wrong should indicate to you that getting UNDERSTANDING perfect is not necessary, for an exam, or maybe even in real life (idk I’m only a 2L).
So, spend at least as much time practicing explaining (through writing, talking, whatever) as getting the doctrine down. Because at the end of the day, explaining and analyzing is what you’re doing on the exam.
Hope this helps? And also, I hope this method works for me again in December!
Best of luck friend, I know this is a rough time in the semester. Make sure to have a lot of fun and go outside and use the bathroom and all of that.
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On Monday, October 28, 2024 at 01:53:44 PM EDT, [redacted] wrote:
Hello mister Knox
I’m a 1L warrior wondering if I can get some tidbits/tips on how to study for a closed book final. If you have any advice that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for all of your previous guides they helped me out a lot at the start of the semester.
Sincerely [redacted]
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knxnts