My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Fourteen)

Finals Week #1 (December 6^th-12^th, 2009) – Part One

Two days before finals, I e-mail my friend Lauren looking for reassurance:

“Please reassure me that there’s a bunch of stupid people milling around silently under the radar who are going to pad the curve below me even though I don’t actually know anything about contracts, civ pro, criminal law or criminal procedure.”

Seriously, I figured that a lot of people that I haven’t met and don’t see around very much might be getting overwhelmed around this time. Not exactly the nicest thing for me to hope for, but I needed some kind of insurance against landing in the bottom half of the curve. In competition, part of succeeding is hoping that your opponent slips up.

To be honest though, after really productive group study sessions on Sunday and Monday night, by the time Tuesday came along my study partners and I all felt good about the coming test. In fact, despite the fact that my final on Tuesday wasn’t until 6 p.m., I didn’t study a lick during that day. I felt that I knew what I needed to know and that the best thing I could do was relax. One of said study partners went to the gym with me and we just shot the basketball around for a while until a couple of hours before the test. It was a nice little release.

I arrived in the testing room feeling pretty good…but the tension that others are obviously feeling is pretty infectious, and it’s hard not to get a little bit nervous. In the back of my mind, I knew I should be fine, but I equate the feeling to what I had when I did school and church dramas in high school; there were butterflies every time until I had spoken the first line, at which point I hit an immediate groove and nerves ceased to be an issue. I figured that the same would be the case here, that as soon as I wrote my first intelligent sentence on the test I’d settle down and feel pretty much fine for the duration.

As the test began, I was already a bit thrown by the fact that there was only one fact pattern to work through for the entire three hour test. To give you some idea, there are usually at least two questions, sometimes three, and they’ll each draw off of an extensive hypothetical that is spelled out over at least one full typed page. For this to have three or four pages of a really dense hypothetical (truly, it seems that every single word is on purpose in these), was a somewhat intimidating thing to start off against.

As I began to spot issues though, I calmed down a bit. It was a difficult test, more difficult than any of his past exams which I had worked through with my study group (they all agreed afterward), but I just worked through it piece by piece as calmly as I could, and by the end I was honestly pretty happy with the end result…and as time went on after the test, I only felt better and better about it. The only thing that really threw me for a loop was that restitution, probably among the five most talked-about concepts in the course, never presented itself at any point in the hypothetical. During the final moments of the exam, I was purely leafing through it just searching specifically for a way to work that concept into my test…it simply wasn’t there. I was relieved afterward when I mentioned this to several classmates and unanimously got a reaction of, “Yes, thank you!” We were all relieved that nobody could find it. It was amazing to me that he somehow didn’t put it on the test, but I’m confident that he truly didn’t. I’ll never know if he was trying to mess with us or if it was just a strange oversight…

The other thing that disturbed me as I finished my test was my word count. I had only typed about 3800 words. My perception on the word count concept had been skewed during the summer because I had typed about 8200 words on my torts exam; I was fully aware that I wouldn’t type nearly as many on this one, both because that was a four hour exam and this was a three hour exam, and also because Professor Bethel made a point of telling us that he wouldn’t be impressed by or reward high word counts. Still, coming in with less than half the amount of words spooked me…until I started broaching the subject with classmates and found that they had typed less than I had, or an equal amount. I henceforth found that torts exam to be a huge aberration from what I would usually type on the test, and if my memory serves me correctly this 3800 word count from my contracts exam turned out to be the highest of the four in this finals period.

Since my mind had been put at ease on both the restitution and word count issues, I calmed down and became really happy with how the exam had gone. This was bolstered to an extent by an unsure feeling I sensed among my classmates…this hadn’t been an easy test, and I got the sense that I felt better about it than a lot of others did. I think I put myself in position to contend for an A here, but time will tell; I’ll say that I feel good enough about this exam that I’ll be disappointed with anything less than an A-.

By the time my exam was uploaded into the system, it was 9:30 p.m. In theory, I should have gone home and studied civil procedure…but give me a break. A three hour exam is really mentally tiring, and I doubt any studying I could have done that night would be productive. I joined some classmates who went and grabbed a beer at Kilroy’s, enjoyed my evening, and went to bed knowing that my next two days had to be really productive in preparation for Friday’s civ pro final.