This is 9 of 10 posts on exams, also known as “The Exam Series,” created by collaborators Amanda Bynum (Professor of Practice, Law | Director, Bar & Academic Success | The University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law); Shane Dizon (Associate Professor of Academic Success | Director, Academic Success Program | Brooklyn Law School); Halle B. Hara (Professor and Director of the Academic Success Program | Capital University Law School); Jacquelyn Rogers (Associate Professor of Law | Academic Success & Bar Preparation | Southwestern Law School); and Sarira A. Sadeghi (The Sam & Ash Director of Academic Achievement | Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University).

After-Exam Topics

Don’t engage in counterproductive exam review. Do not discuss exams afterward; this is not a good idea in the best of times and is even less so now.  The impulse now will probably be greater than normal, as your learning environment and access to study groups have changed dramatically, and the desire to validate what you spotted and what you wrote will increase. With online exams, you will likely have the fact pattern in your possession and your outline near you.  Do not scour your outline to see what you should have said or what you might have missed, or discuss the exam with your peers; when one exam ends, put it away and move on. You might consider quite literally doing this, as in putting your physical casebooks, printed notes, outlines, and supplements in a drawer, part of your bookcase, or upper shelf in a closet. You can virtually do this by creating an archives folder on your laptop or cloud storage and moving everything there. (Bonus tip: consider setting a calendar reminder to donate or to sell your supplements to next year’s students or to your friendly academic support faculty’s lending library.) Again, there is little to be gained by revisiting the exam when it is over. Do not waste time or mental energy by rehashing what you could have—or should have—done. 

Do engage in productive self-reflection after the exam. DO reflect on the process of the online exam and what did and did not work well for you.  Were you able to finish the exam?  If not, why? Did you need to look up too many rules, or lack understanding of how they applied in the fact pattern?  Were you able to quickly and efficiently find rules when you needed to use your outline?  Why? Did you have a table of contents or tab system that was efficient?  These types of reflections can help inform your future exams. There’s actually a name for them: exam wrappers. In a 2019 law review article, Professor Sarah Schendel at Suffolk University Law School noted that even a thoughtful, one-page reflection on your exam performance can go a long way towards lasting self-improvement.

These are also important reflections to engage in when you are doing practice exams. If you take the practice exams under testing conditions—timed, open-note, etc.—you can and should ask yourself these same types of questions to better prepare yourself for the actual take-home, online exams.

What are your after-exam habits? How will you avoid counterproductive exam review but still engage in productive self-reflection? Make a plan now and share it in the comments!