We are already in the tenth week of our 14 week-2 day semester. There are some essential tasks for students to complete if they are going to take advantage of long-term memory in exam review.
- Getting caught up with course outlines is very important. These are the master documents for exam study. Course outlines condense briefs and class notes to manageable page counts. In addition, these outlines refocus students on synthesis of individual cases into the bigger picture with meaningful legal tools to solve new legal scenarios.
- Although it is important to memorize black letter law, studying for exams is far more than memorization. Students should achieve understanding: how rules and exceptions work together; how the black letter law works to solve legal problems; how policy affects the law.
- Reading a course outline from front to back page at least once a week helps to keep all of the topics and content fresh. This cover-to-cover review prevents memory loss while the student focuses on in-depth study of specific topics or subtopics.
- Intense review of specific topics or subtopics leads to greater understanding. By really grappling with information, a student prepares to use that material on an exam. When focusing on a specific slice of the outline, it is important to think about what the concepts really mean and why the law works as it does for the topic. During this specific study, is the time to get any confusion clarified so that the topic is truly prepared for the exam.
- Practice questions are imperative if a student is going to succeed at the highest level on an exam. Practice questions are most effective when done several days after intense review of a topic. The questions monitor whether the student has understood the material, has retained it, and can apply it to new fact scenarios.
- For essay practice questions, students should write out their answers and compare them to the model answers in the practice-question books. Merely answering a question in one's head does not promote the necessary skills of organizing a complete answer and writing that answer in concise sentences.
- For multiple-choice practice questions, students need to pay attention to the reasons for their errors. Sometimes it is misunderstood content. However, it can also be misreading questions, choosing general rather than specific answers, picking by gut rather than analysis, and other errors.
Students want to distribute their learning throughout the remaining weeks rather than cram at the very end. By promoting long-term memory instead of brain dump, they will be able to retain more information for later bar review. (Amy Jarmon)
