Law school in general has less to do with intelligence, aptitude or creativity and a lot more to do with the tenacious and irrational ability to continue caring long past the point that any sane person could ever concievably do. It's the ultimate intellectual endurance sport. I remember when my brief flirtation with running culminated in a victorious half marathon (private event featuring only myself). What really struck me was that my legs may have been jelly, but they didn't feel so bad. My general physical condition really altogether was pretty well insulated by a huge surge of endorphins. What really got to me at the end were these little inconveniences: I had an itch on my back that I couldn't reach, there was this really bad blister chafing my arches, there was sweat in my eyes. Physically, I could have gone - in my head anyways - another five or ten miles, but mentally, it was a battle. That, right there, that's lawschool. End of story.
This is particularly manifest at the end of the quarter when (a) every one is fending off the blistering burn-out of giving up weekends to write memos that mean nothing, missing loved ones, going legally blind from all the reading, whatever else and (b) the biggest and hugest portion of our grade is yet determined by a set of three to four hour Seinfeld-episodes-in-the-making that are judged in the most scattershod and capricious of ways. It's a fun contrast - THIS MATTERS(!!!)... but I kind of don't care anymore...
There is a lot of analysis that goes into preparing for an exam, most of which has nothing to do with the material. For instance, my White Collar Crime professor gives exceedingly fair tests. This actually isn't as positive a thing as you might imagine, because of course in ls exams, it's not how well you do, it's how much other people screw it up or drop the ball that counts. If every one learns a lot and does well, it might make your professor happy, but it does very little for us in an academic sense. In fact, the more fair a test, the more likely that the biggest thing that will separate the wheat from the chafe will be stupid little mistakes and not in fact major misunderstandings.
In a test like this it is particularly heartening to hear things like:
"I didn't really take notes the second part of this class... so there's that..."
"I'm just like not in the mood. I don't really want to sit here for four hours!"
"I am the least prepared for this test of any test this quarter."
- I don't care, I'm out of here on Friday forever!!"
In my head, there is a little abacus furiously shuffling beads (the students are beads), because it is all on a curve and your suckiness is my awesomeness. On the one side, there are the super diligent students with backgrounds in criminal prosecution and defense who have eaten up all the available A's. Then there's the other side of the people who didn't care quite as much. When I listen to this bravura, I happily can start moving some beads from the middle to all the allowable lower scores. This kind of sets the band of where I might end up if I don't do something ... "creative" Technically this test was worth only fifty percent of the grade, but curved grading renders this kind of thing meaningless, since the curve is applied after all the points from our assignments and tests have been tallied. Since we all likely did well on the assignments, within a very narrow point spread, the assignments were mostly just a place to lose ground, but since they happened earlier in the quarter - and thus while we still cared a lot more - not a lot of people lost a lot of ground. If we all got the same score on the assignments, they would essentially be rendered meaningless. I'm not sure we did, but I bet it was close. Thus our grades ultimately just depend on the test. So who's prepared and who isn't matters once again.
I suspect I did well on this final, but I also suspect most people did well.Ok... as I was leaving I did notice a student whose head was on the laptop and who appeared to be sleeping... move another bead to the lower scores. I am amazed at the number of students obdurately staying to the absolute last minute despite the fact that the final was intentionally and actually written to be about a three and a half hour final with extra time so that every one can finish.
My upcoming finals have their own calculus involved. Employment Discrimination is... well, a Schnapper test. It will be kind of the opposite of White Collar Crime in a lot of ways. With WCC, the focus was always kind of raising the relevant issues concisely and moving on. With Schnapper tests it's about getting crazy, throwing any and every creative and bizarre theory you can against the wall. It also requires that you have absolutely every text you've breezed past during class because somewhere a case/statute name and a page number will be referenced and if you don't have the text, supplement, other supplement, etc. you might as well just go. Anyways, while in WCC, every one is pretty well prepared more or less and in a good situation to do well, in Employment Discrimination every one is confused, distressed, and totally unsure how to approach it. This actually can favor people like me, as I can squeeze blood out of a stone but ultimately it just makes it a huge crap shoot in terms of how you prepare. I've done really well on his tests previously, but lord knows this time around.
I suspect that Transmission of Wealth is where the field is most wide open. It's going to be tight - four pretty big questions in three hours. Nobody will get everything, so typing skills and preparation and quick thinking matters. It covers the widest range of topics. And it was the biggest class, meaning there's a fairly broad contingency of preparedness and aptitude to handle. The test is going to be challenging! Which is kind of a good thing, but means the most important thing is just keeping track of the time.
The other equation is "how much coffee do I imbibe" and on which test? It's easier for morning tests, because I find that if I have caffeine after about noon, I am screwed for the next five days on sleep. So I don't really drink caffeinated coffee for afternoon tests. But if I have a significantly larger portion of coffee in the morning, some of it sticks around just for fun into ... well those next five days of course. And if that means one super focused test early on and two later in the week marred by sleep deprivation, this is probably not a great thing. I think I did a good job today, particularly considering I just have like a liter of coffee that I made yesterday sitting around in a bottle - this could have gone very poorly if I had been more stressed out during the exam and started drinking the way authors chain smoke. Luckily usually the stress of a final comes before i know what's on the final. I kind of enjoy (yeah, sick I know) the actual final part. Not as much as I enjoy recycling all the test materials and syllabi etc. afterwards.
Anyways. Gotta keep running. Still more tests. What's the intellectual equivalent of Gu?
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