I am seeing more students the last couple weeks with one major question. How will I memorize all this law? My short answer to them, you won't. I know that answer terrifies many students, especially high achieving students. The vast majority of students walked into final exams with precise knowledge of individual subjects. No one feels that comfortable with the bar material. One big piece of advice is, you can’t remember everything and should focus on what is most likely tested. While true, the most likely tested material still covers over 20 subjects.
Clear techniques from research can increase most people's memory. Everyone has varying degrees of innate ability to remember items, but nearly everyone can use a few simple techniques to remember vast quantities of information. Joshua Foer wrote a book (Moonwalking with Einstein) discussing this particular topic. He studied and entered a memory competition after only practicing the techniques for 1 year. After that 1 year, he won the competition. Here is a 20 minute Ted talk discussing his experience.
I highly encourage students to watch the video. This is a Ted talk, so it is a little difficult to understand how it will apply to law school. Here are a few tips created from his talk:
- Create Visuals for Information – Notice how it was easy for him to remember his speech due to the silly visual. This is exactly what you should do for concepts and rules. It is much easier to remember a very specific image of a tort happening or contract negotiation than it will be to remember the exact words of the rule. Images, stories, anecdotes, etc. All of that will help remember concepts.
- Structure – Inherent throughout his discussion of memory palaces is structuring information. Foer talks about how we remember structured ideas. It is easier to memorize items that are structured. Your structure may be different, but you still need structure. This is one of the reasons making an outline in law school was so important. It is easier to understand how everything relates to each other if you create the structure. Make sure to understand how everything fits together. That will all improve memorization. The great news is expertise helps create structure. Getting a J.D. is the expertise necessary to pass the bar exam.
- Pay Attention – Memorization can only occur when someone is focused. The brain needs to import the information into memory. Focus on the task at hand. Put away phones and email. While in the lecture, create a structure as the lecture progresses. When studying, focus on memorizing. Take breaks every hour to prevent burn out. The key is to pay attention.
- Spacing – In a separate interview he did about his book, he criticized the education system for failing at this concept. The idea is people lose information immediately after studying it. The way to retain the information is to periodically review it throughout the process. For instance, reviewing outlines throughout the semester helps final exam performance. The same is true for the bar exam. Space periodic review all the subjects. That is included on most companies bar prep schedules, but if you feel like you are forgetting a particular subject, then do a quick review.
- Chunking – In the same separate interview (which isn’t online anymore), Foer states that our working memory only has 7 chunks (+ or – 2). We can only really put 7 things in and try to remember it. I believe he is mainly discussing short term working memory, but the idea is still helpful for bar prep. He says individuals can chunk (or categorize) items to remember more information. The basic idea is that it would be difficult to remember a 20 digit number (ie – 28947503782305905367), but remembering a combination of 3 digit numbers is much easier (ie – 289, 475, 037, 823, 059, 053, 67). Associating numbers with images or other information can increase retention (for me, I could remember 28, 94, 75, 03, 78, 23, 05, 90, 53, 67 easier by associating them with football player numbers). This is huge for the bar exam. It will be extremely difficult to remember all the rules individually, but chunking information can increase retention.
- Lastly, Grit – Foer says memorizing is hard work. It won’t be easy, but those who work through the obstacles can make it. The same is true for the bar exam. You can be successful with hard work.
(Steven Foster)
