Back in 2007, here at the Volokh Conspiracy, I had a post on how to excel on law school exams. I have heard that the post is still read among law students, so I decided to expand on that post and turn it into a more helpful essay for today's students to read.
I finally finished the draft, and I posted it on SSRN yesterday. You can read it here: How to Excel on Law School Essay Exams: A Guide for Students. It begins:
This Essay offers guidance on how law students can earn high grades on law school essay exams. It starts with the goals law professors have when writing exams, which then frames what counts as a poor or strong performance. The essay then presents a hypothetical exam question with four answers, and it grades the answers to help explain what makes the different answers better or worse.
This is just a first draft, and I plan to improve it over the semester, so please send specific suggestions for improvement to me at okerr at law dot standord dot edu. I'm particularly interested in feedback from other law professors, as I'm trying to capture how grading looks from the faculty perspective, all to help students do their best.
I see this essay as a companion piece to my 2007 essay, How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students, and also last year's video, So You're About to Start Law School: A Guide to the First Month. The goal of all three has been to share the insider knowledge that connected people have with everyone else, so that students without connections start off on more equal footing and law school on the whole is more fair.
The post An Essay on How to Get Top Grades On Law School Exams appeared first on Reason Magazine.
