My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Sixteen)

Finals Week #2 (December 13^th-19^th, 2009) – Part One

I had to put my disappointment in the civ pro exam behind me so that I could perform optimally on my last two exams, crim law and crim pro from Hoffmann.

As I put it in an e-mail later in the evening on the day that I took the exam,

“Hope the test went well for you Lauren. I’m putting mine behind me; I have to be like Peyton Manning and shrug an interception off like a man, not like Jay Cutler and go to the sideline to cry like a little baby about it. Okay, so I was whining through much of lunch with Justin and Ryan about it, but I’m done with that now. Until I see my grade, at least. Besides, I do think contracts went well.”

The sciatic nerve situation continued to take a toll on me. I couldn’t sit in my recliner at all anymore, I could really only find any reasonable comfort in sitting in a rigid (read: less comfortable) chair. I could set up on the right side of my couch to create a natural leaning, but even that wasn’t great. All of this made it much harder to study, I had to keep switching positions and periodically getting up to walk it off…just sort of miserable.

And when my study group came back over the next night, I discovered that they were once again ahead of me on their outlines. With them talking back and forth over the top of me while I was trying to get some individual work done (having recognized that they were talking about material that I wasn’t adequately prepared to discuss in-depth), and me again being really irritable due to my injury, I eventually just had to suggest that we break and reconvene as a group the next day when I would be better-prepared.

Ultimately, I ended up not meeting the next day either, and we just agreed to meet on Monday at the library, as on this topic I was mostly finding solo study to be more productive for me. We did finally get together  as planned on that Monday (the day before the exam), and did the one available practice exam that Hoffmann said would be relevant to this course. While I had worried in days leading up to this that I wasn’t very well-prepared to take this exam, both in my knowledge of the material and with Hoffmann’s style being so far from black letter law that I was unsure how he would test us, I felt really good about how well I knew the stuff when it came down to taking the practice exam and going over it with my friends. I continued to study throughout the day and late into the night, just discussing problems or questions as they came up with my friend over instant messages.

I went into the test feeling confident. My Facebook status update read, “After civ pro on Friday, I walked out, shook my head and said, “Good game, law school. You win.” Crim law final this morning will be my redemption.”

One note about these last two exams: unlike my contracts and civ pro exams, where outlines could be used, Hoffmann employed a closed book/closed note policy for his exams. The security blanket of an outline was going away, which I admit was a scary proposition. Of course, since everyone would be at the same disadvantage, it ultimately should not have mattered.

As I read through the exam question, I felt perfectly comfortable that I could write out a quality answer. I was also amused that in his hypothetical situations, Professor Hoffmann kept using a main character named Forest Panther, a professional golfer who had recently been found to be cheating on his wife. Clearly this was a reference to Tiger Woods, and I kept visualizing Tiger as I wrote my response; in fact, I had to stop myself several times from writing “Woods” instead of “Panther.”

This exam did have more than just essays to write. Hoffmann included a short answer section, with 10 questions that were worth a maximum of five points each. A concept or term would be written and you had to give a handwritten short answer response. He described the grading scale as follows…

You would get one point for writing anything, even just a check mark (he then proceeded to mention past students who would leave answers completely blank, which is obviously a silly mistake). You would get two points for getting close to the right definition of the term. You would get three points for getting the right definition. To get up into the four or five point range, you would then have to describe the applicability to the course and subject matter.

For the first nine questions, I knew the terms really well and thought I made a solid bid for five points in each of them. The tenth question, however, stumped me. I truly didn’t have any idea what the term meant. I pondered for 30 seconds on whether I could BS my way into more than one point, but decided that I couldn’t really see a way. I eventually just wrote, “You finally stumped me, Professor Hoffmann. Well played.” Sure, it’ll only get one point in the same way that a check mark would, but I can rarely resist an opportunity to try to be funny. I wasn’t that upset that one had stumped me, due to how well that I felt the first nine questions went.

In all honesty, this exam was my best performance of the finals period. I felt great about it, and felt afterward that I couldn’t really have performed much better than that; as to the short answer that stumped me, I never even found it in my notes when I looked later, and I never missed a session of crim law. There was obviously a failure in note-taking at some point, but not in my exam prep leading up to the test.

However, where my hope in civ pro lies with the fact that so many people seemed to be down about their own performance also, the opposite was taking place here. I wasn’t the only one who felt great about my exam; almost everyone seemed to. As such, this grade will be particularly difficult to predict. I wrote well enough that I could see myself getting an A, but it sounds like the competition for the few A’s in the course will be pretty fierce. I’m certainly hopeful that I’ll get at least an A-, but I’m prepared to find out that I got a B+ also. It would disappoint me a bit, but I just have to understand that with the brilliant minds I go to school with, if most seemed to feel good, I might be in the middle in this case. That, and we’re at the mercy of Hoffmann’s subjectivity on this one, even more than in other exams. The philosophical nature (as opposed to the concrete black letter stuff) lends itself to more professorial subjectivity, and Hoffmann did say himself that great weight would be given to the organization and thought process that was displayed in the answer. In other words, eloquence will win out in a big way in this exam. I like to believe myself to be eloquent, but reasonable minds may differ. In any case, I can’t possibly see myself being below a B+ on this exam.

I’ll get whatever I get on this exam, and will make peace with it. Like I said, I didn’t feel like I could have performed much better; as such, it would be irrational to be disappointed with myself if I didn’t get a mark that I liked. Obviously I could be disappointed with Hoffmann not liking my exam as much as I hope he will, but I’ve done what I can and it’s out of my control now.