First Monday Musings By Dean Vik Amar: 4 Tips For Law Students For Final Exams

Dean Vikram Amar offers advice to law students about how to show their stuff come exam time.

Dean Vikram David Amar

Dean Vikram David Amar

As a law dean, I care deeply about helping students master legal skills and information, and also helping students learn how to demonstrate their mastery in various settings. One important such setting is the law school final exam, so in the space below I’d like to offer four pieces of advice for law students in the midst of preparing for or taking their spring exams. While some or all of these recommendations may seem intuitive, in my two-plus decades of teaching constitutional law, civil procedure and related courses, I have been regularly surprised by how many students at the very good law schools where I have been privileged to teach (such as UC Davis, UC Berkeley and now Illinois) seem not to be heeding suggestions like these.

Two Tips for Exam Study

The overwhelming majority of students take law school exams seriously. I can report that over the last week the dozens of the students at Illinois I have talked to are all approaching exams in a professional, calm and assiduous manner. But in law school we learn (or should learn) that working smart is sometimes as or more important than working hard. So what are some of the best ways to make use of exam study time? To be sure, going over class notes, outlines, and course readings is a good start. Talking to other students in the class – especially about some of the cutting-edge or tricky concepts – is also extremely beneficial but generally underutilized. The same can be said for writing out full-blown (not just outlined versions of) answers to past exams from the professor (or from other professors at the school, since although different professors may cover slightly different materials and test somewhat differently, there is usually more overlap than divergence, and there is a reason that people who do well on exams tend on the whole to do well more or less across the board, regardless of who the professor is).

But here are two lesser-known but very helpful things to do. One is to actually write out succinct but complete answers to many of the questions that appear in between the principal cases in the casebook. I know that most law students — when they finish reading a primary case in the book and get to the Notes and Questions section between big cases – tend to ease up a little, skimming these connecting materials and using them as a bit of a mental break between the periods of intense concentration required to fight through the (sometimes turgid) prose of many complicated cases. But these Notes and Questions are inserted in your casebook because they really do help students figure out whether they have comprehended — and are able to apply to new situations — the main points in the principal cases. Make no mistake: addressing these Notes and answering these Questions (in written form) can be challenging, but challenging in precisely the way many law exam questions (whether issue-spotters or more targeted queries) are. Since you are going to have to take on the latter, the former is a good way to train.

Suggestion number two for exam prep is to read some law review articles. There is an old adage that you don’t really understand something until you are able to teach it to someone else. I think a corollary (for legal analysis, at least) is that you don’t really understand a legal concept, case or grouping of cases until you are able to understand and have coherent reactions to what experts write about it. I’m not talking here necessarily about the long, theory-heavy, overarching law review articles that seek to reconceptualize large swaths of law. (These pieces can be exceedingly important contributions to legal scholarship, but are not as useful for what I write about today.) I’m talking instead primarily about sophisticated, grounded analyses of particular legal doctrines, rules, statutes, cases and the like. Now these types of pieces may constitute a smaller share of the scholarship published in leading law reviews today than they did a generation ago, but there are still plenty of high-quality essays of this type (written by exceptional students and practitioners in addition to law professors) coming out every year. Also, since most of the cases and concepts that are taught and tested on in law school go back a number of years, many pieces of legal scholarship published a while ago on legal developments that go back further still remain quite helpful today. (For example, there are great primers on Marbury v. Madison written in the 1960s and 1970s that are still of great pedagogical assistance to students in 2016.)

Two Tips for Exam Execution

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So much for preparation.  What are good ways to show off your knowledge and analytic skills on the exam itself? It should go without saying that exam responses should be well organized and make proper use of paragraphs, topic sentences and grammatical conventions. Assertions should be fully explained and well supported by reference to logic as well as legal authority (e.g., the text and reasoning of past judicial decisions or other documents). But here are two other shortcomings (to be avoided) that I often see in exams (even those of good students).

First is the absence of explicit consideration and treatment of counterarguments. A good piece of legal writing (like other rhetorical writing) will anticipate the natural objections, questions and rejoinders that might come to the mind of a reader who is not already predisposed to accepting the position that is being advanced. A good exam response not only foresees such reactions; it addresses each of them in specific terms, by explaining what is lacking in them or why (if objections do have coherence and force) on balance they are outweighed by the force of arguments on the other side.

My discussion of a second common slip-up follows from my presentation of the previous one. Just as it is important to be balanced and to address the strengths and weaknesses of both (or multiple) sides of a question, usually it is also important to come out with a bottom line. Rarely does the prompt of an exam question ask a student to discuss a cluster of issues without providing at least a tentative resolution of them. Indeed, whether a bottom-line is formally asked for or not (and if it is, make sure you give one!), most good discussions of the law offer the writer’s sense not just of the complexity of the matter, but also of the best answer to a legal quandary. Quite often in the law (and in law school exams), there is no perfectly right answer to a legal question, but some answers, on balance, cohere better with the totality of legal and logical data points out there. And most professors want to know what you think those best answers are, in addition to seeing how you got there.

To all the law students out there, GOOD LUCK, and remember that exams measure but one small part of what accounts for becoming a great lawyer.


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Vikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at amar@illinois.edu.