Now it doesn’t matter how many hours
spent studying and revising – the law examiner doesn’t know that. He meets you one time…for 3 hours…on
paper…and you have to make it count.
The two biggest criticism of law exam Candidates
are (1) they do not answer the exam question (2) Poor time management.
As it relates to not answering the
exam question –Examiner say that the law students do not answer the exam
question. The law students will of
course disagree - - as far as they are concerned, they have just come out of a
3-hour exam and they wrote for 3 hours, so they must have answered the
question. Well you the law student as
well as the examiner are both right - - the law student did answer the exam
question - - he or she just didn’t answer the exam question the examiner asked. What do I mean by that? Well, there is the exam question asked by the
examiner. And there is the exam question
answered by the examinee. There is a
book – Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. The title might as well be - - Law Examiners
are from Mars and Law Examinees are from Venus.
Because if I had a dollar for every time a law student says to me - - I
don’t know how I failed land…I felt really good after the exam. All of my topics I studied for were on the
exam. In fact, I thought I had failed
tort and I got a 60 in that…If I had a dollar for every time I hear that, I
would be a very rich woman indeed. The
point is (let's take land law - - yes I know, I LOVE land law), an examiner will ask a question such as: What does it mean for someone to be in
“adverse possession” of land and In what circumstances does time stop running
in favour of an adverse possessor?
What a law student reads is: What is everything I can possibly remember in
the area of adverse possession and write down in 45 minutes? And they answer that question, briefly
mentioning the meaning of adverse possession and completely ignoring the time
stop running bit.
I must admit that sometimes the exam
question is written as if the exam writer is living in a parallel universe in
his own head; but if you read the question carefully, it does actually make
sense. What you need to do is to
consider the question as a legal hypothesis, and dissect it for legal
principles, DO NOT try to visualise the characters as actual persons and the
situation as something in real life. It
is not. It is a hypothetical situation
constructed to encapsulate legal principles for you to identify, in context,
and answer.
Now, As to the second criticism of
poor time management, I want you to understand the significance of poor time
management. If you have four questions
to complete in 3 hours, and you decide to do 2 to the best of your ability, you
don’t need to be a mathematician to realise, that even if you wrote each
answer, worthy of a Law Lord, you simply cannot get more than 25% of the
entirety of the marks for each question, so you cannot get more than 50% of the
available marks. So by doing 2
questions, you are already setting yourself up to get a reduced percentage of
the available marks.
So, if you can address these two main
criticisms, you are more than half way there.
Starting with the latter first, how do you deal with time
management? Well, one of the biggest
mistakes I see law students make, is to spend hours and hours reading. I will say this, I have never met the law
student who didn’t have the knowledge and pass.
But I have met the law student who has had the knowledge and
failed. Because the knowledge alone is
not enough. The primary piece of advice
that I will give you about time management is this - - if the first time you
are writing under timed conditions is in the exam…you have already failed - -
yourself. Because in your preparation,
what you need to do, is to ensure that you write out in full, at least one
question to a past exam question from your University; and write at least one
under timed conditions. If you are
sitting an examination of three hours, in which you are required to write 4
questions, then you have 45 minutes per question but that is NOT 45 minutes
writing time - - you will need about 5 minutes to prepare the question and 5
minutes to re-read the question. So you
effectively have 35 minutes writing time.
No Before you go into the examination, you should know EXACTLY what 35
minutes of YOUR writing looks and feels like.
So some examinees ask - - how much should I write? You need to be able to write 35 minutes worth
of an answer! So if you practice, and
you know that a topic with which you are extremely familiar, and which you are
prepared, you can write 6 sides of an A4 sheet, then you know that is the very
best you can do in the exam, so you ensure that in the exam, after you have
written 4 sheets, you keep an eye on the clock to make sure you are on target
time wise.
That’s your time management. What about your question answering
ability? Let's talk about that tomorrow............
No comments:
Post a Comment