Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Catch Up

So it's been quite a while since my last post. I would cite the craziness of finals, but other bloggers seem to be capable of blogging during finals so the conclusion is I am a bad blogger. Or diary writer. This always happens, I start, but get bored, but it won't be happening here.

So since I last wrote I encountered and survived reading week and finals. Now my reading week was very productive. I finished my torts outline and made flash cards for civ pro and then it just sort of dwindled. I discovered the problem. I can not work at home. There are far too many distractions and I have S.O.S. (shiny object syndrome: diagnosed by my leadership professor in undergrad ;-D). So I found a new place to study, a coffeehouse with $2.50 bottomless coffee and it's really good coffee. I got there, posted up, and studied. One day I made a flowchart for torts (Negligence) and another I did flowcharts for contracts (Common Law and UCC) Contract Creation, SOF, and Damages). The act of making them really helped (I'm a partially visually learner). All flowcharts are in 2007 Excel.

I did a little group work leading up to finals, but the one session we had before I had a grasp on everything felt useless to me. After I finished my outlines and flowcharts group was more productive because I knew what questions I wanted to ask, what I needed clarification on, and was able to do hypos. Now we have bar hypos on our school's website, but all they did for me was highlight what I hadn't learned so I had to gravitate away from them and ended up using a mixture of past exams (from my and other professors) and hypos that group created. It was hard to keep the same level of motivation throughout the entire three week period, but I feel that I did well.

And then came the actual tests. First up was torts. I should have been nervous because it was my first law school final and this was the typical law school test (first and only grade of the semester). So our professor told us that it would be between 1 and 3 fact patterns, but based on his past exams I was ready for one long fact pattern...and that's exactly what we got. After learning everything and all of the cases I expected something exciting and I got...negligence. 90% of the test was negligence and there were 2 intentional torts and respondeat superior. I felt cheated. I could have said "f learning anything past negligence" and would have been okay. I was robbed.

Next up was Civ Pro and since we had two other tests during the semester, we only had about 40% of the material to remember. And after the midterm that had everyone in our section on pins and needles, this was a walk in the park. 18 short answer questions and we were out of there. It was what I expected and I am happy with my performance.

Finally, contracts. This was the one that caused my stomach to do the jumpy thing because it was open book. Open book tests are the devils in disguise because you want to have everything you possibly could, but the most important thing is not the quantity of your materials, but how well you know them and can get to the information you need. But this one we knew that there were going to be four questions and two of them would be damages (hence the flowcharts). Now once I got in there, I did the panicked "holy hell I don't see any issues," but once I took a breath, I saw what I needed to see. The test was going smoothly and I was issue spotting like a pro and then I got to question number three. I was doing my first read through and jotting down some issues that I saw and because it dealt with cell phones, my head was in the UCC. And then I got to the last line "use common law to analyze this question." That threw me off for a minute, but I shook it off and went back through the question replacing my UCC cites with common law stuff. I thought it was sneaky, but nothing I couldn't handle. But apparently some of my section mates decided that because the contract involved a good common law would never apply and they told the professor that and applied the UCC. WTF?! The professor told you to use common law, so USE COMMON LAW. It's not that difficult.

The final thing that arose because of finals was people wanting to spend hours deconstructing an exam that we just spent four hours on. I am not one of those people and made that known, but it's hard when there are 85 people in your section and 80 of them want to talk about the test. I mean everywhere I went there were my sectionmates ready with congratulations and questions. I tried to avoid them, but it was impossible especially since I was in a group with three of those people. I was so tired and just wanted to go home. So I did. And it was the best decision I think I made all semester. And my sanity thanks me for it. Well that's the catch-up post. I'm off to write essays and prepare my resume so I can get a summer job. I'll probably be MIA until the new semester starts, but there will be blogs!

2 comments:

  1. Like you torts exam, our contracts exam only covered the first part of the course. Everything we learned from November onwards was absent. That, or I have failed my contracts exam ehhe:)

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  2. Thanks for the post. I'll learn from it and try to remember to read the question first, so that I don't waste time focusing on the wrong thing. Hope you did great!!!

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