Tag: dys choi

Law School Exams

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Here is a guide to make the transition from university student (in whatever discipline) to law student a bit easier by focusing on the biggest dragon: the law school exam. Obviously, there is substantive law and brand-new content, but I am mainly focusing on the pedagogical elements.

Structure

Exams are awful. They’re often your entire grade and try to test you on your knowledge of everything in the course. They take the form of “fact patterns” or “issue spotting” or just a hypothetical scenario that forces you to apply your knowledge of the law. For example, Sally the scientist slips and breaks a beaker of blood over Jerry the janitor who is a temporarily hired employee from overseas…

The way some people look at it is to look for a fork in the road. This means that you can argue both sides, and the professor wants you to argue both sides. You have to show the professor that you know both sides. I can argue that Sally is negligently liable because she had a duty that she breached and she caused a harm to Jerry; alternatively, I can argue that she did not have a duty because the people who hired her as a scientist are not supposed to keep slippery floors. Here are some cases for one side showing rule X, and here are cases for the other side showing rule Y.

Mechanics

You need to type fast because it’s a time crunch. On top of that, you need to get use to exam pressure conditions. It’s so easy to get careless and miss something under pressure, and it’s hard to do your best thinking under pressure. Another way to put it is this: be comprehensive. Address every issue thoroughly, and don’t miss a particular way to address an issue. There are so many ways to tackle an issue, and here is the just tip of the iceberg of considerations: interpretation (plain meaning, original purpose, etc.), words compared to actions, standards of reasonableness, scope, application, rights, efficiency…

How do you get better? Drill past exams. Preferably your professor’s exam – you want to note patterns – but other exams are just as good for building up exam skills. You need to sharpen your eye to spotting issues.

Summaries

Exams are mostly open book meaning you’ll need a summary. Summaries are exactly like they sound: they summarize the material so you don’t have to look through your textbook. Well, you don’t have time to look through the textbook; in fact, you’ll barely have time to look at your summary. That’s why people have long summaries and short summaries and maybe even a super short checklist. You know how boxers say fights are won in the training camps; it’s the same thing here, you need to put in work so you’re thinking as little as possible during your actual exam.

You might come across a policy question on your exam that makes you write an essay. The temptation here is to “can” or prepare answers ahead of time. Professors will punch you in the face for this. Personally, it can be effective with a bit of luck. But luck is your enemy if you want consistent top performance. I like to prepare ways of structuring my answer with elegant ways of starting my sentences. Under a time crunch, I wouldn’t be able to come up with, “While expectation damages are the default remedy in contract law, the fact that in this scenario…”

Studying

You need to know the material enough that it’s second nature. You need to know it so well that you can use it in new and creative ways. This might mean knowing it cold or having it memorized. The exams are putting different puzzle pieces of the law together. You need to know the puzzle pieces in order to put them together. This goes beyond memorizing into the realm of comprehension.

Another important part of studying is going to class. You might say that the professor just says everything in the book. You’re wrong. This is where the mind games being: you need to ask why are they teaching this, and why did they choose this content, and why are they are focusing on this? Get into your professor’s head.

The Principle of Charity

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There’s a trope that law school self-selects for people who like to argue. Let’s assume that’s true. Even if you like to argue – or, pedantically, you might call it “debate” – you may not be going about it in the most productive way. If law school is all about education, the way we go about disagreements and conversing about opposing views needs to also be about education. This is where we need The Principle of Charity.

The Principle of Charity concerns the way we go about assessing an argument or particular viewpoint: in essence, before we attack or disagree, we must seek the most charitable interpretation, or looking at it from the most persuasive light. It’s about our methodology and entails suspending our own beliefs while seeking a sympathetic understanding of the idea in question before evaluating it.

This sounds easy, but it is especially difficult when we feel our views are being attacked and we recoil almost instinctively. We ought to avoid our initial reaction to disagree and tolerate any trivial mistakes in order to understand the larger context; the larger aim, here, is a cooperative enterprise at understanding the other’s views and trying to get at the truth together instead of emphasizing contradictions or contentions.

Why is this necessary? For one, communication is imperfect – often, things go wrong. As W.V.O. Quine wrote, “assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of languages.”[1] Maybe people fail to convey exactly what they have on their mind, or maybe they do and others interpret it the wrong way. Second, we have various cognitive biases which can create blinds spots in our reasoning. Instead of getting defensive at the possibility of being wrong, we should exercise humility and be more sensitive to the possibility that we misunderstood something. We are fallible and we are generally not very good at getting at the complete truth by ourselves.

We should forget about trying to look right (or avoid being wrong) and actually care more about learning from each other. Does this mean that we shouldn’t be skeptical? No, the idea is to be skeptical in the right way – specifically, jettisoning intellectual arrogance or being overly obtuse.

I want to close with a couple of everyday examples of cognitive mistakes we make to underscore the necessity of intellectual humility:

A driver cuts you off and you label them a jerk. It’s equally possible that they didn’t see you or had a personal emergency. You’ve probably cut someone off before and didn’t label yourself a jerk – perhaps you blamed it on your lack of sleep or the fact that you are late for class.

You wait until the last minute to do your essay and you do really well. Perhaps you might attribute your success to the last-minute pressures, but correlation does not infer causation. You might have done just as well or better if you started your essay earlier.

Going to Google and typing in something like “my views” and “correct” to see what others have to say. This way of selectively searching to confirm your own views is particularly dangerous with modern personalization algorithms that conjure up views matching your own. The resultant echo chamber is the worst sort of partiality and fails to be critical in any meaningful way.  

[1] W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass: The M. I. T. Press, 1960), 59.