Tag: IRAC

Rule Statements on Exams that Get Top Grades

Post author By Beau Baez
Post date February 17, 2018

Hand writing word rules, for rule statements

There are ways to write rule statements on exams that get top grades. Many students don’t know how to do this, even though it’s not a difficult skill to master. Specifically, students fail to provide thorough rule statements. A thorough rule statement is one that accurately defines the primary issue, each relevant word in the issue, and any related issues.

Fact Pattern Example

Brad and Bella are in the same high school math class. One day before class, Brad thinks it would be funny to pull the chair from under Bella as she is sitting down. He quietly goes to Bella’s chair, and just as she is sitting down he pulls the chair out from her. Bella falls on her rump, but is not physically hurt. Bella is quite embarrassed by Brad’s action. Discuss all causes of action Bella can bring against Brad.

Poor Rule Statements

A poor rule statement for this question might read: “A tort occurs when someone intentionally hits someone else.” The rule discusses parts of a battery, but fails to mention the tort by name. It also fails to identify, let alone define, all the relevant terms. It is not enough to identify some amorphous intentional torts and fail to specify battery.

Average Rule Statements

An average essay answer might read like this: “a battery is the intentional contact of another in a harmful or offensive manner.” This is a good basic definition for battery. However, it fails to define the three key elements of battery: intent, contact, and harmful or offensive. You may want to watch this video on battery for a deeper understanding of this tort.

Superior Rule Statements

A superior essay will have a rule statement like this: “a battery is the intentional contact of another in a harmful or offensive manner. Intent is defined as someone who desires the act, or has knowledge to a substantial certainty that the contact will occur. Contact is defined as the physical touching of a human being. And finally, harmful or offensive is measured by what society deems as harmful or offensive.” As you can see, in addition to the average rule statement, you must also define intent, contact, and harmful or offensive. Why? Because these three key terms will drive your analysis.

IRAC Method

Remember, it is not enough to use the IRAC method in an answer. Even average answers tend to use IRAC, but they miss out on points because they fail to define necessary key terms. You don’t have to define obvious words like “is” or “the.” But you do need to define every term that judges and lawyers find significant. And by significant, I mean words that can be disputed at trial.

Application

Finally, don’t forget that a great rule statement is only the first step in getting a good grade. Some students have superb rule statements, and then bomb the application section of their essay. It is imperative that you apply the facts to the rules to get higher grades. This isn’t the only thing that differentiates the average answer from the superior answer, but it is a significant factor in students receiving lower grades.

How to Improve

The best way to improve is through practice. You need to take short practice exams and then get feedback on how you performed. Most professors will not review your practice exams, so get help from your academic support department or private tutor. Also, create a small group for the sole purpose of taking practice exams. If you’re not in a group, you may want to watch this video on law school study groups.

Tags IRAC, IRAC method, law school exam, law school exam strategies, law school exam tips, law school tips, rule statements

Essay Exam Exam Grading Exam Preparation

The Rule Dump: #1 Law School Exam Mistake

Post author By Beau Baez
Post date January 23, 2018
No Comments on The Rule Dump: #1 Law School Exam Mistake

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.

Tags IRAC, IRAC method, law school essay exam, law school exam, law school grading, nested IRAC

Essay Exam Exam Preparation Study Technique Time Management

Answer an Essay Question Before You See it!

Post author By Beau Baez
Post date November 15, 2017
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Would you like to answer an essay question before you see it! Want to have more time on exam day to think through your answer? You can have 60% of your essay exam complete before exam day with this preparation method.

Ideally, you should already have three sets of notes, as I mentioned in my episode called “Three Sets of Notes Method.” In addition, you need to create a fourth set of notes, which I call your Exam Answer outline. This is an organizational tool that will allow you to move quickly during the final. Also, you will write a much stronger essay.

The Process

Here’s how it works. For each possible issue, you will write the ideal answer into your Exam Answer outline. Obviously you won’t know the names of the parties so simply use “Defendant” and “Plaintiff” for the parties involved. And while you do not know the parties’ names, you do know the law and how rules interact with each other.

Negligence Example

Let’s go through a negligence example. Ask yourself what the ideal first sentence of a negligence answer looks like. Then write out something like: “The issue is whether D was negligent when he committed the act against P.” On exam day, you will replace “D,” “P,” and “committed the act” with the facts from the exam.

The next sentence is your ideal rule statement, which you will pull directly from your rule outline. “Negligence occurs when a defendant owes a duty of care, breaches that duty, is the actual and proximate cause, and there are damages to the plaintiff.” Then wrap up the first paragraph with a brief conclusion. Because all the elements are met, D is liable to P for negligence. By the way, if you haven’t noticed, I am using the IRAC method, which I covered in an earlier blog post.

Now, write the second ideal paragraph, which in this case involves duty of care. “The first issue is whether D owed P a duty of care. Duty of care is a legally recognized relationship between the parties, and is measured by the reasonably prudent person standard. In this case D owed P a duty of care because….” At this point you’ll have a blank, which you will fill in on exam day. Then the last sentence will read: “This element is met (or not met) because D owed (or did not owe) P a duty of care.”

Negligence Per Se

You will do this for each element, but don’t stop there. You also need to create alternative paragraphs, depending on the issues that might appear on your exam. For example, before you get to the final exam, have you thought through how to deal with negligence per se? I ask this because when you have a negligence per se question, you need to discuss the negligence per se AND the reasonably prudent person standard. And you need to do this because it is always possible that the court will deny the negligence per se instruction, leaving you with having to argue the reasonably prudent person standard. This means you need to have an ideal paragraph for this possibility.

So work through negligence per se, using this approach, and end the negligence per se paragraph with something like this: “Plaintiff should be able to establish duty through negligence per se. However, if the court finds that negligence per se cannot be used, then Plaintiff can still prevail under the reasonably prudent person standard.”

There are other areas that you also need to think about. Where does res ipsa loquitur fit into an exam? On a criminal law exam, where do you discuss premeditation? On a contracts exam, where do you discuss a UCC distinctive?

Final Advice

You can wait till exam day to think about all this, but if you plan it all out in advance, now when
you have time, you will know exactly how to structure your essay answer and understand the connections between the different rules. This approach will also give you more time to focus on the analysis portion of the exam, which is where most professors award points. For some additional ideas on how to structure a pre-planned essay, see this guide on how to structure an essay.

By the way, if you have an open book exam, you will truly have a huge advantage over your colleagues that haven’t done this.

Tags IRAC, law school essay, law school exam, organization

Essay Exam law school academic success Torts

IRAC: Law School Essay Formatting Method

Post author By Beau Baez
Post date November 6, 2015
No Comments on IRAC: Law School Essay Formatting Method

Organization boxes representing IRAC method

The IRAC method is the most popular organizational method used on law school exams, with IRAC standing for Issue, Rule, Analysis (or Application), and Conclusion. Without a solid organizational system, students miss issues and fail to do the kind of deep analysis that law professors are looking for. Having graded thousands of law exams I can tell you that no student has ever gotten an “A” without good organization skills.

The Method

Issue

The issue statement provides the topic that you are going to discuss in the paragraph. For example, one paragraph might deal with the intent element in a battery action. The issue statement might read: Does Henry have the necessary intent to commit a battery? If the essay deals with contract formation, then the issue statement might state “Does John have a valid contract with Maria.” The key is to let the reader know what you are about to discuss. This means providing enough information so that the reader understand what is going to follow. Also, when writing a law school essay, you should assume the reader does not know the facts or the law. You must lead the reader along, explaining everything. If you don’t explain it, then don’t expect to receive credit.

Rule

The second sentence in the paragraph is the rule. For intent, you should have something like this: Intent is defined as the desire or knowledge to a substantial certainty that the contact would occur. You must not only provide rules for the main issues, but also definitions for any legally significant terms.

Analysis

Third comes the analysis, which is the section that connects the facts to the rule. Here, you want to demonstrate that you understand why and how the facts are connected to the rule of law. The biggest mistake in this section is when students merely copy facts from the question they were given. Without explaining why the facts are important, all you are doing is sharing a story. Narratives get few to no points when graded.

Conclusion

And finally, provide a short conclusion, which must follow from your analysis. For example, it might read like this: Henry meets the intent element for battery. By the way, if you are struggling with battery, you might want to take a course on the intentional torts.

Nested IRAC

When you follow the IRAC method, it is not enough to IRAC only main issue, like negligence, contract formation, or involuntary manslaughter. You must create a separate IRAC for each element or legal term. This is called Nested IRAC, and students who organize their answers this way end up with higher grades. In a tortious battery, you will always need at least four paragraphs. The first paragraph to introduce battery, and then paragraphs for intent, contact, and harmful or offensive.

Form and Substance

Please keep in mind that IRAC, as good as it is, will not move you into the “A” category by itself. Unfortunately, there are students that earn D’s and F’s while using the IRAC method. In other words, IRAC is not a panacea that does the heavy lifting on an exam. So yes, use IRAC as a formatting tool and then work hard on Issue spotting and Analysis. That is what will help you the “A” grades you want.

Exam Preparation

Your essay will only be as good as your exam preparation. Work on creating a strong law school outline, as that is where the R in IRAC comes from. Next, learn the rules well by using the Leitner box flash card method. Finally, you can write most of an essay before you ever see it with the model answer preparation method. All this takes lots of time, at least initially. But soon you will master the science behind exam taking, which will lead to higher grades and less preparation time.

Tags IRAC, law school essay, law school exam