Final 1L Finals

Here’s what my exam days have been like this week:

• Up working on outlines until around 2 am
• Setting my alarm clock for 6 hours later and going to sleep
• Waking up after 5 or 5½ hours (before my alarm goes off)
• Studying until it’s time to head to school
• 3 to 3½ hours of multiple choice questions and essays
• Going back home and doing almost nothing the rest of the night

Happily, this only happened twice this week, Tuesday for Property and Saturday for Contracts. The rest of the week was spent in off-and-on studying and other miscellaneous activities.

Outlines are the law school equivalent of permissible cheat sheets. Each is a personally created summary of rules, cases, and notes from the whole semester that you get to use during the final exam. Ideally outlines get done early, but my exam preparation wasn’t exactly top-notch this semester, hence my finishing them the night before exams.

I came out of my Property exam feeling it was relatively easy, which probably means I missed a lot of the nuances of the essay questions. But I was just glad to be done.

I went into my Contracts final feeling generally confident, until I saw the first question. My option at that point was to either break down or slog through, so slogged through the next three and a half hours.

I came out of Contracts feeling I’d somehow missed the connection between the given facts and the law we had learned. But after overhearing some classmates’ reactions I felt somewhat better. It seemed that a good portion of the class felt the same as I did. Again, I was just glad to be done.

So I only have one more final exam this week (for Constitutional Law), then (yay!) I will be a 2L and my first year of law school will be over.

Finals week is a much bigger deal here than it was during undergrad. Most professors let you take the exam anywhere in the school (or in some cases anywhere at all), as long as you turn it in on time. That means there is a general embargo on noise anywhere besides the lobby. The library is closed to everyone besides students, faculty, and staff. The lobby serves primarily as a post-test forum for expressions of relief and commentary on the most recent exam.

Turning in an exam is also different than when I was an undergrad, mostly because ten years ago almost no one used computers for finals. Now everyone does. They say you can hand write your exams, but I’d be shocked to actually see it happen. Also, all the grading is done blindly, so each student is assigned a blind grading number to use instead of his/her name. That number goes on everything – exam booklets, scantrons, and essays.

If your essays are typed, submission is a multi-step process. They must be uploaded to an online system before the end of the exam time, so you have to watch the clock. Then a copy has to be printed (the library printers are very popular for about 20 minutes) and turned in within a certain time frame. The good soul who receives them takes each copy one by one and has each person mark the time the printed copy is turned in. She does this for every exam over the two weeks of finals.

So, this week feels like the next volume in the long series of tests that is law school: Law School Admissions Test, Fall 1L finals, Spring 1L finals, Fall 2L finals, Spring 2L finals, Fall 3L finals, Spring 3L finals, Bar Exam.

Plenty left to look forward to, huh?