Understanding the Law School Exam

You may be wondering why information on final exams is being provided even before orientation. Law school exams are quite different from any type of exam that you've taken before, and that should affect how you prepare throughout the semester. It is also worth knowing ahead of time that many of your class grades will be decided mostly or entirely on your performance on the final exam - many classes will not even have midterms. There are entire books devoted to the subject of law school exams, and we've provided a list of some of those books at the bottom of this page, but here are some of the basics you should know about law school exams.

Cartoon by Terry Hart Links to an external site.

How are law school exams different? What do they test?

You will spend all semester reading cases and learning how to talk about them. When you read court opinions, you are observing how lawyers and judges work through legal problems. In class you will learn to dissect and discuss that problem solving process, and you will begin to engage in it yourself through in-class questioning. When you get to the exam, you will find that you are asked to perform a task that you have mostly watched others perform up to this point - instead of observing and discussing how a judge analyzes a case, you will actually engage in that problem solving process to analyze a situation created by your professor.

In his book How to Do Your Best on Law School Exams, Professor John Delaney lays out six tasks typically required by law school exams. Since he stated it so well, we won't reinvent the wheel. He says:

"In typical exam problems, you are given a detailed fact pattern, often extending for a page or more, single-spaced, with your professor's question at the end. You must perform the following six tasks:

1. You must extricate the key facts from the non-key facts embodied in the often dense fact pattern (also called relevant and non-relevant facts).

2. You must spot and specify the issues raised by the key facts in light of your professor's interrogatory at the end of the essay problem.

3. You must select the correct legal rules (or principles) to be applied to resolve the identified issues.

4. You must apply the rules by interweaving the key facts with the elements of the applicable rules or with the principles (or their tests or standards).

5. You must sometimes indicate the policy purpose(s) served by the application of the relevant rules.

6. You must do all of the above with concise, time-pressured, lawyerly writing, and sometimes argue two or three ways as required by the facts, the rule and your professor's expectations."

What kinds of questions appear on law school exams?

Different professors will include different kinds of questions on their exams, but your finals will likely consist of some combination of multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions.

Multiple choice questions on law school exams often look like bar exam questions - they contain a fact pattern, a question, and four answer choices. They test both your knowledge of the law and your ability to apply it to factual scenarios. See the Answering Multiple Choice Questions page for more information.

Short answer questions may test your knowledge of legal theory and policy, or they may ask you to perform shorter applications of law to fact (i.e.: determining which future interest in land is created by certain language).

The classic law school exam question is the long essay question. It consists of a complex fact pattern (usually called a "hypo," short for hypothetical) that ends with one or a series of questions. The student is expected to read the fact pattern, identify the legal issues raised by the events in the hypo, and analyze each issue based on the applicable law. This is the type of question that calls for IRAC writing. The long essay question requires close reading, good organizational skills, thorough knowledge of the law, and an ability to raise arguments and counter-arguments.

If you want to see what these questions look like, flip through the Emanuel, Q & A, or Gilbert supplements and look at the practice questions they provide. These are all available in the reserve section of the law library. These books can give you an idea of what an exam question might look like. Several of the books linked below also include sample exam questions.

How are the exams graded?

As with all things law school related, this may vary depending on your professor. A couple points worth considering:

- Your exams will be graded anonymously. You will be identified only by a four digit code assigned by the school. For more, click here Links to an external site..

- Most of your 1L classes will be graded on a curve. You can find more information about SU Law's grading and curve here Links to an external site..

- Some professors grade using a rubric or points system. Issues, rule statements, and analyses are each worth a certain number of points to be awarded to students who spot and accurately discuss them, and the points are added up to determine the final grade. This is one reason that good issue spotting and using some version of IRAC can be important - if you fail to spot a lot of issues or you never give complete rule statements, you are automatically leaving points on the table.

How do I prepare for a law school exam?

The Academic Enrichment Program has a number of pages devoted to exam prep. You can find them here:

Exam prep starts much earlier than you might expect. Because there is so much material covered each semester, it's incredibly difficult to get it outlined and memorized in just the last few weeks of the term. We generally recommend starting outlining about 3-4 weeks into the semester. Any time you finish a topic (as defined by your class syllabus or by your casebook's table of contents if the syllabus isn't clear), you should start outlining that topic. The information will still be fresh in your mind at that point and it will save you valuable time later in the semester.

Students often overlook the importance of regularly working on practice questions. That may include looking at short answer questions in E&Es or other supplemental materials, doing multiple choice questions from Quimbee or Q&A books, doing problem sets for your professors, or taking full practice exams under exam conditions (timed, no notes, no breaks). Professors vary widely in the amount of practice material that they provide, so even if you aren't getting anything from your professor you should still seek out practice resources. ARC can often help you find what you need. We will post practice questions in the Question Bank throughout the year.

One more good tip - ask your professor what you can expect on the exam and whether they plan to make old exams available. That allows you to target your preparation more effectively.

Additional Reading

All of the books listed below are available in the law library - Amazon profiles are linked so you can see summaries of the books.

Open Book Links to an external site. by Barry Friedman and John Goldberg

How to Do Your Best on Law School Exams Links to an external site. by John Delaney

Succeeding in Law School Links to an external site. by Herbert Ramy

Mastering the Law School Exam Links to an external site. by Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus