Law students are always looking for shortcuts. The problem is that a shortcut by definition is not efficient or effective: it is cutting corners. Yet year after year, students listen to the upper-division student myth that you just need to get another outline and not make your own.
So let's get it out in the open before it is too late in the semester to still create a good outline of your own: learning occurs when you grapple with material and process it yourself.
- Using a secondhand outline means that someone else learned and processed, you did not.
- A borrowed outline means that you become a parrot who can recite the information without understanding that information.
- You need to understand the law at a deeper level that you reach by outlining if you want to apply it adeptly to new legal scenarios on an exam.
- Each person learns differently; another person's outline or a commercial outline may not match how you need to process material to learn.
- A professor's change in perspective on a course, legal reforms, or a different casebook can all make a prior outline inaccurate – or even obsolete.
- A commercial outline is for a national audience and rarely matches your professor's structure, emphasis, or state jurisdictional focus.
- The quality of the borrowed outline may be suspect if you do not know the grade that was received for the course.
Looking at another outline for format ideas and to check for missing concepts or nuances if legitimate. But depending on it instead of doing your own hard work is asking for deficient learning. (Amy Jarmon)
