Tips for Midterm Success: A 1L Perspective

Congratulations on being halfway done with your first semester! If you’re anything like me, you may not know where the semester has gone, or how it’s time for midterms already. For many people, midterms can seem stressful because they are probably your first real, graded assessment in law school. However, I urge you let some of that stress go (they’re probably only worth a small portion of your grade anyways) and view them as a positive learning experience. Think about it this way: would you rather have no feedback on how you’re doing until after you take a final that constitutes your entire grade? Probably not. Of course, you still want do the best you can, and there are a few things you should consider to make your midterm experience the best it can be.

Give Yourself Enough Time to Prepare

Preparing for law school exams is a completely new experience that will likely require a lot of trial and error to find what works for you, so don’t wait until the last minute! You will probably know whether you have midterms and when they will be held as soon as you get your class syllabus, so be sure to mark this on your calendar and plan ahead. Remember that unlike during finals period, you’ll still have to read for classes and work on any ongoing legal writing assignments while preparing for your exams. During this time, you’ll probably also need to schedule time to outline (or make other study aids) and complete practice questions. Balancing all of this can be challenging, so be sure to make a realistic schedule and stick to it.

Make Your Own Study Aids

Making your own study aids rather than relying on commercial outlines, or other student’s outlines, is likely one of the most important things you can do to prepare yourself for success on midterms (and finals for that matter). The process of making an outline, flowchart or any other type of study aid is imperative to the learning process because when done correctly it forces you to put all of the pieces together and synthesize everything that you’ve learned so far. Working through this yourself is likely to greatly enhance your understanding of the material. If you skip this step, it may be much harder to understand how all of the information you’ve learned fits together. Remember that the process of making an outline or study aid is studying in itself, they don’t have to be complete and perfect for you to learn from them!

Make an “Attack Plan”

We’ve spoken about the benefit of having an “attack plan” before, and midterms are a great time to start making and testing these. In addition to understanding the nuances of the law and how to apply it to a new set of facts, you will also need to be able to present your answer in a clear and organized manner. This sounds like a no-brainer, but the time limit for completing exam questions is typically very tight, leaving little or no time for extensive editing or planning during the exam itself. An “attack plan” should be a framework that allows you to see what steps you need to work through in order to complete an exam question. This can be something like the steps you need to go through to determine whether or not a court has personal jurisdiction over a party in a Civil Procedure question, or what elements you must discuss for an intentional tort question. If you’re able to lay out the skeleton of how you’ll analyze potential exam issues ahead of time, you will be able to write a much more organized answer on exam day.

Do Practice Questions

Completing practice questions is another critical piece of any midterm or exam preparation. One of the challenges of law school essay exams is that for most people, they are a totally new experience. Like most things, practicing these is the key to improving your performance. In addition to knowing the rules, you will need to be able to apply those rules to a new set of facts in a clear and organized manner. Executing this will be far more difficult if the first time that you attempt it is on a tightly-timed exam. Try to complete these under simulated exam conditions (time yourself!) so that when you sit down to take the real exam you are in the habit of writing your response quickly and efficiently.

Get Feedback and Learn From It

In most cases, midterms should really be seen as a learning experience rather than a high-stress assessment. Getting feedback and learning from your experience is likely the most valuable part of the process because it shows you what you need to work on well before final exams. If you can, be sure to get feedback on your performance from either your professor or TA, and work on incorporating their suggestions into your answers when you (hopefully) do more practice exams before finals.

Although they can be stressful, try to view midterms as a good thing. Regardless of how you perform on them, they’re a great opportunity to assess whether your methods are working for you sooner rather than later!