Learn From Your Mistakes:
Fall Semester Finals
If you haven’t already,
you should take the time to evaluate yourself and assess your goals for law
school. Now that grades have been released, a great way to start is by looking
back at your finals from fall semester. This can be a painful but very
rewarding process.
Meeting with your professor to look over the
exam is an often enlightening experience. You may remember the question and
your answer to be very different than the one that the professor graded. You
can usually set up a time to speak to the professor one on one about the exam
after grades have been released.
I have not encountered a professor at Capital Law that is not willing to meet with me to discuss exams. If you have the same professor
for this semester, ask how you can improve your writing or what the professor
would recommend to help you to do better on the multiple choice questions.
Often the professor will have great tips for learning the material or offer
suggestions on horn books and the like. If you are not interested in the
substance of the exam, make sure that the points are correctly added
(professors aren’t always perfect). I had at least one law school friend who
had an exam that was incorrectly calculated and the extra points bumped his
grade up quite a bit.
The biggest takeaway from
looking at you exam is to be honest with yourself about how you did on the
exam. You have to know yourself and seek self-improvement before anything will
change. If you know that you did not put in the effort for the grade that you
wanted, readjust your schedule and study habits appropriately to be more
successful this semester. If you were surprised by receiving a higher grade
than expected, make sure that you look back and determine what you did right to
earn that great grade. Make the benefits and downfalls of fall semester
learning points on what you did right and wrong and use them to your advantage
this semester.
