Done with Torts
That’s a relief. The exam was 4 hours: 1 hour of 40 impossible multiple choice questions and 3 hours for essays. I think I may have missed some key points in my essays, so I’m not exactly hopeful for a good Torts grade. Hopefully I’ll pull out something decent.
Even though law school is usually interesting, exams are definitely way more draining than undergrad exams, for a few reasons.
First, it’s partially because of the pressure to perform well on a single test for your whole grade.
Second, it’s also because everyone here received mostly As in their undergrad. And my section’s undergrad schools are basically the top schools in the nation: multiple UPenn, Columbia, Duke, Emory, etc. So basically everyone is studying hard for everything and it’s really hard to differentiate yourself.
Third, there’s a lot more covered. In undergrad, we’d often have a midterm and the final would just cover post-midterm material. It’s so much easier to study for 1.5 months of material than 3 months.
Lastly, it’s really hard to meter your effort by class because you have no idea how you’re doing. In college I would usually run a spreadsheet scenario a few times a semester to figure out the optimal way to study based on how well I was doing in each class based on grades received. I know the spreadsheet thing sounds dumb, but I am a big believer in strategic academics and using spreadsheets was a primary tactic of mine. In return for an investment of 15 minutes, I would get a good feel for what each marginal point on each assignment was worth for every class, how I was doing and how much time I needed to put in. I rarely did more than 10 hours of homework a week, yet got mostly As with a few A-s. And the problem is, I can’t do that here. I still really don’t know how I’m doing. For all I know I’m a C law student. I could also be an A law student. Of course it’s much more likely that I’m a B law student. Just about the only thing I’ve gotten back is a Torts practice test on which I received an A. But that doesn’t mean anything except that I wrote a good exam that day… and it doesn’t count. So I’ve been having a really hard time trying to figure out what to study. I’m not the type of person who can spend 10+ hours a day in the library for a week straight during finals, so I have to spend my “good” study time wisely and I think I may have messed up how I allocated my time this semester. I needed to spend a lot more time on Torts and much less time on Civil Procedure. Oh well, I will see how the grades turn out when I get them back (in February! Law school profs take forever to grade exams).
At this point, I’m basically just glad to be almost done with the semester. It isn’t that I don’t like law school, but I am really excited to go home for a bit, spend a week in the Bahamas (PCA obv) and then get back to Atlanta and work on the db re-design.
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