YOUR FINAL EXAM 7

Very few law school professors give any feedback throughout the semester. You will probably have no practice questions or midterms. Therefore, you will have little information from professors about how you are expected to respond to their questions. You are a most unusual person if you are not scared of having a three or four hour exam determine your grade in a course for which you have given so much of your blood, sweat and tears. Although you have practiced writing many exam questions if you have followed the advice in the previous sections of this book, you also need a strategy to ensure that you do your best on the actual final exam. The first thing to remember is that your professor will probably test you on almost all topics covered in the course. I have found it useful to read through the entire exam before starting to answer any question. (You should know that this works for me but may not work for you.) I take my one page checklist of topics covered in the course (see next page for such a checklist for torts) and try to find them in all the questions. I then write down beside the item in the checklist the number of the question in which that topic is covered. At this point I have made no mark on the exam booklet. Usually there are several topics on my checklist without a question number. Although it may be true that all topics don't appear on the exam, I always assume that I have just not seen them on my first reading of the exam. I do not panic if I don't find a topic or if I see whole sections of questions I don't understand. I will read these questions several more times before I put pen to exam booklet, and when I look harder I usually find the topics.