With exams for many students in full swing, the question becomes how "paced" to "pace" oneself in between a series of final exams. Let me offer one thought as you swing from preparing and tacking one exam to preparing and taking another exam.
For most of us, because we are under significant time pressures to read, organize, and write final exam answers, we tend to approach our preparation efforts with the similar feeling (i.e., that we will never be able to finish a final exam on time) unless we spend most of our exam preparation efforts engaged in timed practice.
In other words, we try our best to work on speed at all costs because we are so worried that we will never finish the exam. But, if you work on speed, you will never get better…only faster. And, that's where the story of the tortoise and the hare comes in.
You know the story. The hare bolts but soon runs out of energy because she did not pace herself. She practiced sprinting in the moment rather than running the race for the long prize.
On the other hand, the tortoise – slow and methodical – just keeps plodding along, step by step, pace by pace, moment by moment, until, against all odds, the tortoise passes the hare and crosses the finish line to the astonishment of all…in first prize.
You see, it is not true that those that write the most or finish the exam the quickest earn the best grades.
Rather, success on final exams comes in showing your work, step by step, pace by pace, moment by moment, in solving legal problems as a professional attorney would do. And, that requires not sprinting in bursts of practice but rather in thinking carefully and slowly and critically and methodically through lots of practice final exam problems.
In short, the key to doing your best work on final exams is to slow down your practice, to reflect on your reading, analysis, and writing, and to incorporate what you learn through each practice set so that you become better able to handle future legal problem-solving scenarios.
Let me give you another picture. Perhaps you've heard the saying: "Chew the cud." According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the phrase means to "think slowly and carefully about the subject." It's roots come to use from another animal account, this time dealing with cows.
You see, cows are said to "chew the cud." Unlike many animals that just swallow their food, cows are constantly chewing their food. That's because the process of digesting food for cows requires a number of steps. First, cows need to chew their food to moisten it in preparation for digestion and send it to a part of their stomachs that adds acids to further soften the food. Then (and this is going to get a bit gross), the first bites of food are sent back to the mouth from the stomach (i.e., regurgitated) so that the cows further chew the softened food so that another part of the stomach can property extract the critical nutrients. http://www.cattle-empire.net/blog/115/what-cud-and-why-do-cattle-chew-it In short, cows can't get fed from food that doesn't get crunched, regurgitated, and then re-crunched again. And, we can't do well on final exams unless we chew on exam problems, write out exam answers, and then review and re-write our answers so that we learn.
In brief, the short days in between exams should be filled with "chewing the cud" by slowly and methodically working through practice problems so that we learn how to get the most out of our preparation efforts for final exams. Or, as another saying goes, "haste makes waste." So, take your time and think carefully and slowly rather than hastily and carelessly as you work through practice problems in preparation for your next final exam. (Scott Johns).
