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About the practice exams; I see that starting a month before exams is good, but how many should a person do for each class?

carsondalywashere wrote:About the practice exams; I see that starting a month before exams is good, but how many should a person do for each class?

Still a 0L here, but I was curious about this as well. I was also wondering about the frequency. How often do you recommend one take a practice exam? Once every couple of days? Daily?

tominusprime wrote:

carsondalywashere wrote:About the practice exams; I see that starting a month before exams is good, but how many should a person do for each class?

Still a 0L here, but I was curious about this as well. I was also wondering about the frequency. How often do you recommend one take a practice exam? Once every couple of days? Daily?

It's going to depend a little on your exam schedule and where you are in your classes - it's not a ton of use doing practice exams before you're done outlining (or however you best digest the class as a whole), and you will probably have a limited number of exams available to you anyway. Ideally you'd do as many practice exams as you can get hold of, but I had a lot of classes where we had maybe three exams tops (though you may get some profs who've been around for ages who have like 10 exams available - the best part about this is not sitting down and formally taking 10 practice exams, but getting a really good idea of what the prof likes to test, because the same issues/questions will recur and you'll start to see the patterns, so when you take the real exam you know what issues to look for and make sure you're answering.)

Personally I didn't usually start doing practice exams until the end of classes/beginning of reading week, because I never got outlining done that much sooner, but it depends on how much of a reading week you get. Exams are designed to be 3-4 hours long and so if you actually sit down and practice writing the whole thing, just like on the actual exam, I wouldn't suggest doing more than 1 day. However, what I usually did was get together with people from the class and outline the exam rather than write everything out, which takes much less time, and so we'd collectively do at least a couple of exams - you just kind of have to gauge when you're getting fried and not retaining anything anymore. (It might also be helpful to practice actually writing out at least one full exam answer before your first exams - not in the sense of worrying about grammar or style, but just to get a sense of how long it takes you to do things like write rules or issue statements or the like. After your first round of exams you probably don't need to do this any more.)

Also, I think generally I tried to do practice exams with other people at least 2 days before the exam (maybe earlier for first semester 1L), and then the day before the exam I'd review all my notes/outline and probably try to outline/issue spot more practice questions on my own. You also need to look at your exam schedule and think about which subjects to do when - I generally tried not to mix studying for different classes on the same day, so I'd do civ pro the 2 days before civ pro, crim the 2 days before crim, etc. You might end up in a situation where one day you do a couple of civ pro practice exams, then the next two days you do crim exams, then take your crim exam, then review civ pro for a day and take that exam the next day, etc.

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A. Nony Mouse wrote:

tominusprime wrote:

carsondalywashere wrote:About the practice exams; I see that starting a month before exams is good, but how many should a person do for each class?

Still a 0L here, but I was curious about this as well. I was also wondering about the frequency. How often do you recommend one take a practice exam? Once every couple of days? Daily?

It's going to depend a little on your exam schedule and where you are in your classes - it's not a ton of use doing practice exams before you're done outlining (or however you best digest the class as a whole), and you will probably have a limited number of exams available to you anyway. Ideally you'd do as many practice exams as you can get hold of, but I had a lot of classes where we had maybe three exams tops (though you may get some profs who've been around for ages who have like 10 exams available - the best part about this is not sitting down and formally taking 10 practice exams, but getting a really good idea of what the prof likes to test, because the same issues/questions will recur and you'll start to see the patterns, so when you take the real exam you know what issues to look for and make sure you're answering.)

Personally I didn't usually start doing practice exams until the end of classes/beginning of reading week, because I never got outlining done that much sooner, but it depends on how much of a reading week you get. Exams are designed to be 3-4 hours long and so if you actually sit down and practice writing the whole thing, just like on the actual exam, I wouldn't suggest doing more than 1 day. However, what I usually did was get together with people from the class and outline the exam rather than write everything out, which takes much less time, and so we'd collectively do at least a couple of exams - you just kind of have to gauge when you're getting fried and not retaining anything anymore. (It might also be helpful to practice actually writing out at least one full exam answer before your first exams - not in the sense of worrying about grammar or style, but just to get a sense of how long it takes you to do things like write rules or issue statements or the like. After your first round of exams you probably don't need to do this any more.)

Also, I think generally I tried to do practice exams with other people at least 2 days before the exam (maybe earlier for first semester 1L), and then the day before the exam I'd review all my notes/outline and probably try to outline/issue spot more practice questions on my own. You also need to look at your exam schedule and think about which subjects to do when - I generally tried not to mix studying for different classes on the same day, so I'd do civ pro the 2 days before civ pro, crim the 2 days before crim, etc. You might end up in a situation where one day you do a couple of civ pro practice exams, then the next two days you do crim exams, then take your crim exam, then review civ pro for a day and take that exam the next day, etc.

Very helpful, thank you!!!

A. Nony Mouse wrote:

tominusprime wrote:

carsondalywashere wrote:About the practice exams; I see that starting a month before exams is good, but how many should a person do for each class?

Still a 0L here, but I was curious about this as well. I was also wondering about the frequency. How often do you recommend one take a practice exam? Once every couple of days? Daily?

It's going to depend a little on your exam schedule and where you are in your classes - it's not a ton of use doing practice exams before you're done outlining (or however you best digest the class as a whole), and you will probably have a limited number of exams available to you anyway. Ideally you'd do as many practice exams as you can get hold of, but I had a lot of classes where we had maybe three exams tops (though you may get some profs who've been around for ages who have like 10 exams available - the best part about this is not sitting down and formally taking 10 practice exams, but getting a really good idea of what the prof likes to test, because the same issues/questions will recur and you'll start to see the patterns, so when you take the real exam you know what issues to look for and make sure you're answering.)

Personally I didn't usually start doing practice exams until the end of classes/beginning of reading week, because I never got outlining done that much sooner, but it depends on how much of a reading week you get. Exams are designed to be 3-4 hours long and so if you actually sit down and practice writing the whole thing, just like on the actual exam, I wouldn't suggest doing more than 1 day. However, what I usually did was get together with people from the class and outline the exam rather than write everything out, which takes much less time, and so we'd collectively do at least a couple of exams - you just kind of have to gauge when you're getting fried and not retaining anything anymore. (It might also be helpful to practice actually writing out at least one full exam answer before your first exams - not in the sense of worrying about grammar or style, but just to get a sense of how long it takes you to do things like write rules or issue statements or the like. After your first round of exams you probably don't need to do this any more.)

Also, I think generally I tried to do practice exams with other people at least 2 days before the exam (maybe earlier for first semester 1L), and then the day before the exam I'd review all my notes/outline and probably try to outline/issue spot more practice questions on my own. You also need to look at your exam schedule and think about which subjects to do when - I generally tried not to mix studying for different classes on the same day, so I'd do civ pro the 2 days before civ pro, crim the 2 days before crim, etc. You might end up in a situation where one day you do a couple of civ pro practice exams, then the next two days you do crim exams, then take your crim exam, then review civ pro for a day and take that exam the next day, etc.

This was incredibly helpful. Thank you so much!