CALI's Pre-Law Blog

4 Aug, 2006

Law school messes with you (sometimes in a good way)...

Posted by AustinGroothuis 12:23 | Permalink | comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | General, Pre-Law Discussions

Remember this post about how I felt like I overextended myself and it likely cost me on a certain exam? I do because I remember how I felt while writing it...deflated about my future grade in that class and exhausted in the aftermath of two summer classes while working. As referenced by this quote:

• "I came out of the test feeling awful, probably worse than I have felt about any other law school exam."

That was no joke. I was pretty resigned to my fate that I would break my string of no less than average grades in law school.

I just found out that I got an A-. That's unbelievable to me. I'm almost offended and feel like I got away with something.

Why I'm Bringing This Up
You hear a lot of this stuff from students in law school after tests. Students think they were unprepared, claim to have bombed an exam, and it turns out they did fine. It can be obnoxious sometimes so I try to avoid claiming to have done poorly on an exam before I know, but I hadn't felt this bad about an exam before.

The test was clearly just a very hard test and likely designed so that students miss a lot of issues. There are a lot of tests like this in law school.

The law school curve again comes into play. I must have done OK compared to the rest of the class (although this wasn't a strict curve so maybe he gave everyone pretty good grades). Your relative performance is all that matters in law school.

Moral of the story: don't assume anything about your grade until you know for sure...namely, don't beat yourself up if you think you did poorly.

How I Did It:
I'm going to sound like a real company guy again, but I am dead serious about this. The course was a UCC Article Nine course on secured transactions. CALI's lesson on UCC Article Nine by Professor William Boyd is freaking amazing. It is so in depth...basically a complete casebook on secured transactions (but without cases and answerless problems to confuse you). It is in a different format than most CALI lessons but I loved it. I relied on it HEAVILY for my outline and througout the semester.

If you take a UCC Article Nine/secured transactions class in law school, remember this lesson (don't forget, you'll have free access to CALI lessons by that time if your school is a CALI member school).

Professor Boyd and John (who has put a lot of time into updating the lesson), if you see this, thank you. It's worth the effort.