I created a video, watch a professor take an essay exam, where I take a torts bar exam question I’ve never seen before. Using bar exam conditions, I limited my time to 30 minutes and took it closed book. This process was useful for me, because it reminded me of the extreme pressure my students encounter on the bar exam and on law school exams.
Useful Exercise
There are several reasons why students will find this exercise valuable. One, it helps them understand that even an expert struggles to complete a bar exam in 30 minutes. Two, they can observe how an expert uses their time to first prepare to write and then write. I then wrote the exam using the Nested IRAC method, an organization technique to ensure you don’t miss anything. Three, they can see an expert make mistakes, and still earn a decent grade on the exam.
The second part of this exercise was to grade the exam using a grading rubric used by many state bar examiners. I first discussed the grading rubric, then reviewed the bar exam grader’s model answer, and finally reviewed my essay.
Comparing Answers
As I compared my answer to the model answer, I was surprised by a few things. For starters, I noticed that the grader was assigning points almost exclusively for duty and breach of duty. Yet the call of the question asked me to “explain” my answer. I understood this to mean a full negligence discussion. That required not only duty and breach, but also actual cause, proximate cause, and damages. To do this for each of the three plaintiffs was impossible on a 30 minute exam–a poor job in designing this exam. A more focused question by the bar exam designers would have yielded better answers. Oh well, c’est la vie.
How Many Points?
Another problem with the essay question was the point allocation of 15% for the final issue on the unforeseeable extent of injury (i.e., the eggshell plaintiff rule). The call of the question appears to give it equal weight with the first question, which was comprised of three parts. Thankfully, I was running out of time when I got to this issue. Therefore, I did not spend more time on it than was necessary. But I didn’t know that when I was taking the exam. So the lesson here is to do your best. There really isn’t a way to know exactly what the grader is looking for. Make sure to discuss all the main issues, and if you have time then discuss minor issues.
The rule dump is the number one mistake students make on their law school exams. This is when the student throws out as much information from the course that they can remember, hoping that some of it will stick. Usually the rule dump, also called a brain dump, occurs all on the first page of the essay. Let me explain why professors hate it and why it is hurting your grade.
College Exams
In college, the best grades go to student answers that have lots of information. This is because most college professors test students on knowledge retention. In other words, if you demonstrate that you read the material you get a good grade. That exam writing style will not work in law school.
Law School Exams
While law school essay exams do require you to know the law, that is only the starting point for a well written essay. Law school exams are testing you on higher level thinking skills. In fact, law school professors grade exams by allocating most of the points to those exams that apply the rules to the facts. So here is what law professors think when they see a rule dump. We start asking ourselves, does this student understand the issue or is the student trying to throw everything they know into the answer because the student is confused. For more information on the levels of learning, you may want to look at this article on Bloom’s Taxonomy from Vanderbilt.
Relevance
On a business associations exam testing on vicarious liability, the facts clearly state that Mat is an employee. Some students will then provide a rule dump with all of the rules needed to establish that someone is an employee, like the level of control between principal and agent. But none of that was necessary as the facts provided that Mat is an employee.
That leaves me wondering if the student understands the issue or not. And guess what happens when there is uncertainty? Students receive lower grades. It is possible that the student understood the issue, but because the student employed the brain dump method that student ended up with a lower grade. The learning point here is that you should only provide the rules that are needed to answer the question.
Conflicts
Another problem with the brain dump is that you might provide different rules that appear to conflict with each other. This will also cost you points. For example, suppose that you are writing a negligence essay. There are absolutely no facts provided in the question to indicate that the victims are children. Some students will then discuss the attractive nuisance doctrine. This leaves me wondering if the student understands the question or not.
Hidden Rule
A third problem occurs when the rule that is needed to answer the question is hidden with several superfluous rules. The professor might miss it completely or not appreciate how you wanted that rule applied to the fact pattern.
Keep in mind that law school is a professional school, preparing students to become lawyers and not professors. When you bring your case before a judge, or discuss your case with a partner, that judge or partner only wants to hear about the law relevant to the case—not everything you know about the law. Judges, partners, AND professors are busy people, so only provide the rules you need to answer the question.
Finally, since all exams have some kind of time limit, you are wasting precious time discussing rules that, at best, will be ignored, and at worst, will cost you points.
How to Avoid the Rule Dump
The best way to avoid the rule dump is by using the IRAC Method. This is where you discuss each issue separately: state the Issue, provide the Rule, Analyze the facts, and give your Conclusion. Unfortunately, many students misunderstand how to use the method, so you may want to read my article on Nested IRAC, which explains in detail how use IRAC on a law school essay exam. Before any exam, you need to practice using IRAC. In addition to taking law school exams, incorporate IRAC into your daily class preparation by using the FIRAC Case Briefing Method.
So you get back your first law school exam and you did not do as well as you were hoping. You go to the professor and ask what you could do to improve on the final exam. At some point during your meeting with the professor, he or she says that exam writing is part art and part science. Even I used to say garbage like that when I was a new professor. What the professor is really telling you is that you really can’t improve and there is really nothing that he or she can do to help you. You’re either born with this art or you are not. If it is innate, then, unless you are born with it, you are doomed!
But if this is a skill that you can learn, then you can improve your performance on a law school exam.
You Are Different
Students come to law school with different skills and abilities. Some have had lots of experience writing technical essays and others just have not. Those with strong technical writing skills do better than those without that experience. And this is not art! I have read thousands of law school exams and what I’ve seen is students at various stages in their writing career. I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen great writers during the first semester of law school. And only once have I seen a student who had writing skills that surpassed my own. Since his name was also Beau, I jokingly surmise that there must be something about the name.
So why would a professor tell you that law is part art and part science if it isn’t true? One reason is that it just sounds true, at least until you are challenged by someone else. That’s what happened to me. I gave the whole “its part science, part art” argument to a senior professor with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. He helped me to understand that higher level writing skills are based on an amalgamation of lower level skills. What that means, in the context of essay writing, is that there are many skills that we lump together and conclude that someone is either a strong writer or a weak writer.
Example
Law school exam essay writing is made up of different components: the ability to organize thoughts, writing in paragraph form, using correct spelling, following English grammar, organizing sentences in paragraph form, use of topic sentences, and so on. Once you realize that there is no dark art, some hidden path for the select few, you can begin figuring out how to improve.
Depending on where you start your journey, you may have more or fewer skills you need to learn to catch up with the top writers in your class. But make no mistake, someone that started essay writing in high school has an advantage, just not an insurmountable one.
Continuous Improvement
The key is continuous improvement. To this day, my writing keeps improving. Recently I was writing in a forum and someone compared my writing to Faulkner. I was certainly flattered by the comment but I recognize he would not have made that comment even ten years ago.
Becoming a better writer takes determination. You need to first diagnose where you are and then work on developing those lower level skills. Once you’ve mastered those skills, then you start working on higher skills, and higher skills. The key is to keep practicing until you improve. (Check out these apps to work on your writing skills.)
The biggest mistake I see when grading law school exams is students failing to distinguish between issues. All issues and sub-issues are lumped together, without using the IRAC method. All that accomplishes is a poorly written law school exam. Before your next exam complete some practice exams–you can get some at my exam bank .
Once you realize that you don’t have to have been born a skilled writer, and have implemented your new skills on the final exam, check out my mini series on steps to take after completing the final exam.
Advanced Law School Tip
If you are ready to take your exams to the next level, you need to write your exams using the Nested IRAC method. This approach to writing law school essay exams is what usually distinguishes the top students. Practice using the method a few times, that way it becomes second nature. Also, organize your notes by creating a pre-written essay outline, which will save you time on the exam.
Have you met with your professor to discuss your law school final exam? Part of being a successful person is to learn from your mistakes and to take steps on improving. Unless you got the highest grade on an exam, you should find out how you could have done better. This means going to your professor. Ask for advice on how you could have done better on your law school essay exam.
Professor Mistakes
Another reason to ask to see your exam and meet with your professor is because professors make mistakes. At almost every law school professors cannot change grades for errors in judgment. For example, the professor may tell you that she should have awarded you 10 points instead of 8 points. But there are times when the professor made a simple math mistake or just wrote down the wrong number in the computer. This is more common than you might think.
Many students fail to seek meetings with their professors because they erroneously believe that they just did not “get” the material. That may be true occasionally, but in most cases law students have not mastered the art of writing a law school exam. So go and talk to your professor and find out what you did wrong. That is the most powerful way to learn and improve.
Think IRAC
When you meet with your professor, think in terms of IRAC. Try to determine if you have a problem with issue spotting, rule articulation, or analysis. Once you know the problem, then you can focus your time and attention on developing the skills you need to improve.
Without feedback from the person that graded your law school final exam, you won’t really know what you did wrong. Keep in mind that a few professors may refuse to meet with you, believing it is a waste of their time. You never want to come across as belligerent. Assure the professor that your sole motivation for a meeting is to discuss strategies for improving, either in one of their other classes or in essay writing in general. With or without that feedback, you may get to the point that you need help from professionals on how to take law school exams.
For more information on how to get feedback from your professors, watch all four parts of this series:
Law school exam grading is one of the least transparent aspects of the law school experience. A student takes an exam and then weeks or months later gets a grade. But a grade without feedback from their professor. They will never discover why they received the grade, and almost certainly no help on improving.
Holistic Grading
The traditional law school exam grading method is holistic grading. This is where the professor reads the exam and assigns a grade based on the professor’s past grading experience. For example, the professor decides that “this exam is an A and the other one is a C.” Thankfully, very few professors grade using this method.
Analytic Grading
The most common form of law school exam grading is analytic grading. The professor creates a grading sheet, where points are assigned for discussing certain issues. For example, on a Torts exam, there may be 1 to 5 points for Breach of Duty. The professor will then decide, after reading each exam, whether the student gets 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 points for Breach of Duty. While this approach is better than pure holistic grading, in practice, most professors are still grading holistically as there are no written criteria for each issue. A true analytic grading sheet, which some professors use, have written criteria in assigning points. For example, a 5 might be given for “rule statements that clearly identified the law and connected the correct facts to the law.”
Feedback
Many law professors don’t provide good feedback for several reasons. First, many are not rewarded by their law schools for teaching. They are not required to meet with their students or help them improve their exam skills. Most law schools reward professors that write scholarly articles that get published in top journals. And for many professors, that means spending time writing and not helping students. A friend of mine was visiting at a top 50 law school and he shared this story with me. His office was next to a faculty member who was always busy writing. This faculty member always kept his door closed and locked, so that he could spend time writing. When students knocked on his door, the students were ignored. Even though the faculty member was inside his office and the students desperately wanted help. This faculty member understood that his top 50 law school rewarded scholarship over teaching. While this story is disturbing, it is all too common at many law schools.
Professors Not Trained in Feedback Techniques
Another reason that professors don’t provide meaningful feedback is because the professor hasn’t spent the time learning how to provide good feedback. For almost every law professor, grading is the least desirable part of the job–who really wants to grade a hundred essays in three weeks. This means that many professors use checklists in assigning grades. For example, a professor grading a 4th Amendment exam might have something like this on her spreadsheet: Police are legally allowed to observe Joe on public street (2 points); Police may stop Joe and ask him a quick question (3 points); Police may pat down Joe for weapons (5 points). And with that checklist, if you are ever allowed to see it, you see that you got 2 points, 2 points, and 3 points.
But that kind of information is almost worthless because you don’t know WHY the professor assigned those points to you. Suppose that you do meet with your professor and you ask her why she gave you 3 points for an issue, you are likely going to get a response like this: “you need to have a stronger rule statement and your analysis could have been stronger.” That is a conclusion that does not really help you for the next exam, and you are likely to continue making the same errors on future exams.
Meaningful Feedback
What every law student needs is meaningful feedback and a plan to improve. From day one I have worked hard at trying to help students improve, but I did a poor job during my first few years of teaching. At first, I would meet with students for about half an hour and go through their exam with them, line by line. That sounds good, but it didn’t work. Then I had shorter meetings and provided students with resources to improve, and that didn’t work either. Over the last few years I came to realize that students don’t improve because they don’t really understand what law school essay exams are really about. Most students believe that an essay exam grade is based on their understanding of the material. That is a profound misunderstanding of the law school essay exam!
Students need more than the law. They also need to use the IRAC Method for organizing their exams. After meeting with many students, especially those that got the lowest grades, I came to realize that they knew the material. If I had given them an oral exam they would have received high grades, not low grades. This taught me that students don’t know HOW to write an answer that makes sense to professors and bar examiners. So once you get your grade, make an appointment with your professor.
Empowering Students
Ideally, feedback should be designed to help students become self-reflective learners. This will allow them to see the patterns embedded in future law school or bar exams. Let me tell you about Henry (not his real name), who was in the first group of students that I worked with using my self-reflection method. Henry got one of the lowest grades on the midterm exam. He was devastated and came to me for help as he did not understand how he could have received this low grade. Rather than telling him what he did wrong, I provided him with some tools so that he could use to self-diagnose his midterm exam. He then spent hours using those tools, and on the final exam received the second highest grade in the class. That was an epiphany for me. I now follow the old saying: give a person a fish, they eat for a day. But teach them to fish then they eat for a lifetime.
You can significantly improve your writing if you stop expecting line-by-line debriefs of your answers. Instead, become a self-reflective learner. It’s hard at first because most students have never done it. It’s also time consuming, which stops many students because they don’t see the value behind the method. But once you go down this path it will help you become a better writer and thinker. For more information on this method please check out our exam grading page.
There are several reasons why students will find this exercise valuable. One, it helps them understand that even an expert struggles to complete a bar exam in 30 minutes. Two, they can observe how an expert uses their time to first prepare to write and then write. I then wrote the exam using the Nested IRAC method, an organization technique to ensure you don’t miss anything. Three, they can see an expert make mistakes, and still earn a decent grade on the exam.
Keep in mind that law school is a professional school, preparing students to become lawyers and not professors. When you bring your case before a judge, or discuss your case with a partner, that judge or partner only wants to hear about the law relevant to the case—not everything you know about the law. Judges, partners, AND professors are busy people, so only provide the rules you need to answer the question.
Holistic Grading
