Interlude #4: Advice for IL's

As a 1L, you probably are worried about taking your first law school final. Don't worry, everyone in law school has felt that way, including the professors. Law school is a strange new beast and the methods you used in college to tame classes haven't worked as well as you planned. Well, here's some advice from a seasoned law school student who has gone through the 1L Ring of Fire and survived with a few scars and burns from stupid mistakes.

General Things to Remember:
1. Relax. Law school is stressful, but don't freak out too much. You're going to get at least a C on your finals. This is due to the mandatory curve and other factors. OK, how do you get a C in law school? Show up for the final, put down your anonymous number, and put down coherent and relevant answers in your bluebooks. Unless you get caught cheating, don't show up for your final, or miss an entire semester of classes, it's higly unlikely you're going to fail.
2. Buy lots of bluebooks. This is not the book you used for legal citations, but notebook paper stapled into a blue cover. You can buy them at your law school bookstore. Try to buy as many as your finances allow. The bookstore isn't open on Saturday and you will have finals on a Saturday. In addition to saving you from the embarassment of not having a bluebook, you'll be prepared for finals next semester.
3. Sleep. Sleep is good. Staying awake all night, hopped up on caffeine will not help you very much. You run the risk of nodding off during your finals or you don't think straight during your final. Either way, your grade will fall sink faster than a mob snitch wearing concrete shoes.
4. Study. It's important to study during the semester. If you don't know and understand the basic concepts now, it's unlikely you'll know and understand them by cramming the night before. It ain't gonna happen. Use some spare time thinking and not drinking.

Basic Concepts You Should Know:
1. Torts: Know your torts. The magic phrase is "reasonable amount of care." What "reasonable" means depends on the tort. The rest of the material that is taught is basically filler to make the class a semester long.
2. Contracts I: Need an answer? Look in the Restatement on Contracts. Enough said
3. Lawyering I: Need to know how to cite something? It's in the Bluebook. Enough said.
4. Property I: Despite the exceptions and exceptions to exceptions, there's only one simple rule on ownership. You own it or someone else owns it. That's it. The Rule Against Perpetuities makes a contingent remainder lasting over 21 years null and void.
5. Civil Procedure I: It's in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Trying to understand them, however, is another story. The drafters should have taken Lawyering.
6. Contracts II: It's all in Article 2 of the UCC.
7. Lawyering II: More of the same, but you also learn real lawyers don't behave like they do on Law and Order or JAG. Plus they're not even that good looking.
8. Property II: It's all about the easements.
9. Criminal Law: Judges say the darnedest things...
10. Criminal Procedure: It reasonably depends on the totality of the circumstances.
11. Civil Procedure II: See Civil Procedure I. Yeah, Erie Doctrine.

The Dark Secret: How Do Professors Assign Grades?
You've survived your finals and you finally see what grades you got. You see them and you're disappointed. You didn't get that A you think you rightly deserved, but you got a B or possibly, the lowly C. You e-mail your friends and casually ask what they got in a certain class. They got a better grade than you did. As you seethe in anger at how unfair the grading process is, you begin to wonder how professors grade tests.
Here's the secret the law school doesn't want you to know: how professors assign grades.
According to the professors, they make sure the grading process is fairly done. If it is a multiple choice test (which it rarely is), the professor scores the answer sheets by hand or by Scantron. This is a very simple process. Some might complicate this process by allowing for objections to questions or allowing explanations on why a student chose that answer. If it is an essay-based exam, the professor will use various safeguards.
The professor will separate the bluebooks into three or four piles. They will start with Question 1 and grade all of the piles. Then they might randomize the piles, making sure that the order in which they grade the tests will not be the same. This insures that the professor will not become lazy and assign the best grades to the same people. There are multiple variations on this grading scheme.
Each question is assigned a certain point value and in order to make the grading process easier, the professor will have a checklist on what the ideal answer will contain. Of course, the professor has had an entire semester to come up with an ideal answer and the normal law school student will not have this luxury. The normal law school student will have an hour to write down a coherent answer. Based upon this time discrepancy, the professor will lower their standards slightly to accurately reflect this difference. If your answer contains an item on the checklist, you are assigned a set value of points. Supposedly, this is the fairest process of scoring tests.
Once all the questions are graded and the points are tabulated, the professor now has to assign grades. Given the mandatory GPA curve for all law school courses (2.8-3.0 for 1L courses and 2.8 to 3.2 for upper-level courses), the professor will need to calculate a bunch of statistics so that the grade distribution fits a standard bell-curve meeting these constraints. Real lawyers don't do math. This process, which took hours, now takes minutes, thanks to advancements in modern technology. Once all of this is calculated, grades are assigned, or so they say.
In reality, the grading process never operates in this Platonically ideal way. Many things go wrong in this "fair" process.
Let's start with the grading process. You can't find many faults with multiple choice exams, other than badly worded questions. With essay exams, everything can and will go wrong. The professors, even after they separate exams into multiple piles, will note bluebooks that have "ideal" answers. They will subconciously/unconsciously remember the anonymous numbers on the bluebooks. These people have a greater possibility of receiving better grades than other people. No matter how you shuffle the exams, this will inevitably happen, despite what professors say about anonymous numbers.
What about the point system--each question is worth X points and these points are distributed in a certain fashion that accurately emphasizes the value of each element in the best answer. It's too bad that professors aren't exactly honest in how long answering each question would take, ideally. The author knows of one professor who honestly stated that "he could spend at least nine hours" answering one particular question. This nine hours would be well spent just wording his answer. Not writing it down, but structuring it so it met his exacting standards. Of course, professors know that coming up with a "perfect" answer is impossible. So they compensate by picking what they think are the most important items in each answer. Assigning points is highly subjective. Essentially, a hundred people could write down the same answer, but the professor will assign a hundred different point values. Given this, how does anyone figure out what grades to assign if you have a large group of people with the same score? Who gets the A and who gets the C? The person who's bluebook is closer gets the A.
OK, the worst thing about the grading process is the mandatory GPA curve for all classes. Why did law schools come up with this nonsense? People in law school realized that grades were subjective. One professor's A is another professor's C. By mandating a curve, things supposedly balanced out. One big problem. A really big problem. It's not fair.
Consider the following. Let's say there's this class called "Commercial Law" and the professor gives a midterm to the class. The grades range from a perfect 56 points to an absolutely dreadful 2 points. Given the range of scores, what grade do you give to the students who did not...ahem...do so well? If you were a tough, no-holds-barred professor, you would give them an F, as their score sucked. Put politely, their score was not exceptional. Some might kick them out of the class or "advise" them to drop the class and retake it later. In law school, however, you do not give them an F. What? You don't fail the student? No. In all likelyhood, the student will get a C. Remember, you need to fit the mandatory curve.
Let's put it this way. Even if the student does miserable on the final, which counts for 70% of the final grade, odds are, the student will still get a C. That pesky mandatory curve will prevent most professors from assigning an F to students, despite knowing in their heart that the student truly deserves an F. A big, fat F. But the professor will most likely give that student a C. Isn't that fair?
OK, try the alternative. Student X gets 85% of the points. That, under normal circumstances, will be a B, right? Maybe a B+ if the professor is generous. Student Y, however gets 70% of the points. That will be a C under normal circumstances. In law school, however, student X will most likely get a B, maybe a B+, depending on how things fit under the curve. It would be even-money odds that both students will get a B. Student X might get a B+ if it doesn't mess up the curve. Does that seem fair? It's not, but that's the law school curve for you.
In the end, the professors will tinker with assigning grades until they fit the nice bell curve. You might get an A or you might get a B. Just like a crooked card game, the entire deck is stacked against you. What grade are you going to get? So, you feeling lucky?