National Jurist -September 2008 - (Page 22) Law School: A Survivor’s Guide By James D. Gordon III, associate dean at Brigham Young University Law School WHY WE LOVE THIS BOOK: It’s funny! Detailing everything from exams and legal writing tips to interviewing for jobs and even the first year of law practice, this book disguises a lot of helpful survival tips in its humor. Just as importantly, it dares first-year students to inject some humor into their lives. 1 2 BOOK EXCERPT FROM THE AUTHOR You should always have a sense of humor. Law school involves quite a bit of stress. Having a sense of humor can help you deal with some of that stress and keep some perspective. You should never cram. Law school means competition, intellectual challenge, not much feedback, and a heavy workload, all of which makes for a stressful atmosphere. Have a clear study schedule in order to conquer the work. Cramming will cause stress and will not work in law school — even if it has worked for you before. It’s important to keep up. The sooner you get behind, the more time you need to get caught up. Law School: A Survivor’s Guide (HarperPerennial, 1994) “By the end of the semester, you need something to save you from the frenzy of laughter of your law school classes. That’s why law schools have final exams. Studies have shown that the best way to learn is to have frequent exams on small amounts of material and to receive lots of feedback from the teacher. Consequently, law school does none of this. Law school is supposed to be an intellectual challenge. Therefore, law professors give only one exam, the FINAL EXAM OF ARMAGEDDON, and they give absolutely no feedback before then. Actually, they give no feedback after then, either, because they don’t return the exams to the students. A few students go and look at their exam after it’s graded, but this is a complete waste of time, unless they just want to see again what they wrote and have a combat veteran-type flashback of the whole horrific nightmare. The professors never write any comments on the exams. That might permit you to do better next time, which would upset the class ranking. Some professors are kind enough to distribute a model answer for you to look at. You tell the professor that you can’t see any difference whatsoever between your low-scoring exam and the model answer. He replies, ‘Well, there’s your problem.’” 3 4 5 “ 22 You should always participate and be honest. Take practice tests, outline answers and discuss answers with a study group. Break the sound barrier in class and form connections with classmates. It’s important for students to be honest in class despite any temptations to cheat or plagiarize. You should know that commercial outlines are OK to buy. Professors say commercial outlines make it too easy for you, and you will not develop the analytical skills and hard-work ethic that law school is supposed to teach. But there are a lot of different commercial outlines and other study aids available. You should always treat law school as an investment. A legal education is sort of like building a house where at the end of the three years, the law school will give the keys to you. If you cut corners and cheat on materials, the ultimate person you cheat is yourself. Remember those horror movies in which somebody wearing a hockey mask terrorizes people at a summer camp and slowly and carefully slashes them all into bloody little pieces? That’s what the first year of law school is like. Except that it’s worse, because the professors don’t wear — Chapter Five excerpt hockey masks, and you have to look directly at their faces. ” THE NATIONAL JURIST September 2008
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