Now available on SSRN.
In 2007, at the Volokh Conspiracy, I published a piece about how to excel on law school exams. I’ve heard that it continues to be read by law students, so I decided to expand it and turn it into a more comprehensive essay for today’s students to use.
I’ve finally completed a draft and it was uploaded to SSRN yesterday. You can read it here: How to Excel on Law School Essay Exams: A Guide for Students. It begins with:
This Essay offers guidance on how law students can earn high grades on law school essay exams. It starts with the goals law professors have when writing exams, which then frames what counts as a poor or strong performance. The essay then presents a hypothetical exam question with four answers, and it grades the answers to help explain what makes the different answers better or worse.
This is only a first draft, and I plan to refine it over the course of the semester, so please send specific suggestions for improvement to me at okerr at law dot standord dot edu. I’m particularly interested in feedback from other law professors, as I’m attempting to capture how grading appears from the faculty perspective, all to aid students in achieving their best results.
I view this essay as a companion to my 2007 piece, How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students, and also to last year’s video, So You’re About to Start Law School: A Guide to the First Month. The aim shared by all three works has been to demystify the insider knowledge that insiders hold, making it accessible to everyone so that students without connections begin on more equal footing and law school, overall, becomes fairer.
