Stress

The three week span from the last day of class, through the "dead week" of no classes or exams while students study and prepare, through the day of the last exam is the most stressful time of the semester for a law school student.

This was my fourth time going through it. A person's reaction to stress varies in expression. I am no exception. Once classes ended this semester, I noticed a strange tickling twitch in my stomach almost every night when I laid down and tried to sleep. During one stretch when I had exams three days in a row, my sleep pattern got completely screwed up. I woke up in the morning at 3am and, unable to get back to sleep, decided to just go on to the library. I was there from 4:30 in the morning studying until my exam started at 8:30am.

In other students, I saw a need for physical comfort. Some guys and girls would suddenly become affectionate couples- if only for these three weeks. I remember a female friend of mine saying last year during exams, "I just need to be held." Another student would go off by herself and cry and then come back normal in time for the exam. Yet another good friend of mine had to seek professional help to get through this semester. He has other things going on in his life, though. I really hope he makes it through law school.

Why these rather extreme reactions? As I have explained before, exams mean more in law school than in undergraduate classes. In most law school classes, your exam grade IS your grade for the class. You receive no other feedback from the rest of the semester. There is a mandatory curve grading system in most classes: The top 5% receive As, the bottom 5% receive Ds and Fs, with the remaining percentages divided between Bs or Cs. We are all aware of what our individual class rank is. Job offers may appear or not based on how well you perform on your exams. Differences of many thousands of dollars in future pay ride on your grades on these exams.

It is a credit to the students of Florida State Law that we do not become cut-throat competitive over exams the way I have heard they do at other law schools. We frequently study in groups and share notes or outlines. I have yet to see a student slicing pages out of a library text as sometimes happens in other places.

While they are no fun, I would much rather deal with the pressure of three exams in a row than trying to complete two mail routes before 9pm in Washington, DC, as I had to do in times past. But that is an analogy unique to my life experience. . .

After two years of law school, I've taken a number of different styles of exams. Some are more fair than others, in my humble opinion. Professors work hard in crafting an exam that challenges students and covers the material taught in the course. The professors here are much smarter than me and have put many more hours into thinking about their exam than I have, but I do have some suggestions that may or may not be useful. While a "fair" exam will probably do nothing to relieve the stress students feel prior to taking an exam, it can help during the test itself and afterwards when we are replaying the questions and answers again and again in our heads.

My number one pet peeve is to encounter an exam that is a typing race. Some of my colleagues are amazingly fast typists, and almost everybody in law school types faster than me. About once per semester, it seems I get an exam designed so that you are not supposed to finish, and the person who can type the fastest and get the most information in a "word vomit" on paper wins and gets the best grade.

One friend who is a very fast typist heard me commenting about this after one exam. She came up to me in the library and asked me to show her how fast I could type. I went to a computer and gave her a demonstration. Her eyes got a little wide after watching me for a minute and she said quietly, "Yeah, that's pretty bad."

During a four hour marathon typing race exam, I managed to get out 8 typed pages, though I could have continued typing for another four hours. One of the highest grades in that class, on the other hand, was an exam of 18 typed pages.

A pet peeve of other students (though not me) is the multiple choice exam. I tend to do better on multiple choice exams, but many students complain about these. When a client comes off the street and presents you with their problems, the students say, you are not going to have multiple choices magically appear before you to select the correct advice to give the client. Some professors in the law school will not give multiple choice exams for this reason, though much of the Florida Bar Exam is in multiple choice format.

The exam software can throw off the fairness of the exam. "Exam 4" is the software we use, and it allows for the professor to have the exam administered in "open" or "closed" format. The closed format shuts down access to any files on your laptop while you take the exam, but open format allows access to these files. Open format gives a great advantage to the students who type and save their notes on their laptop during the semester. They can use the Control F key to locate specific terms instantly in notes that may span well over a hundred pages. A person who hand writes, obviously, does not have this ability. When an exam is open book/note but closed mode on the "Exam 4" software, students who have typed their outlines or notes simply print them off prior to the exam, which levels the playing field with those who hand write. Some professors are unfamiliar with the differences between open and closed mode on "Exam 4."

The most fair exams, in my opinion, are those which present fact patterns like you would receive as a lawyer practicing in the particular subject being tested. The student would then write an essay, identifying the issues and explaining the legal advice that student would give. The exam could be open or closed book/notes, depending on the complexity and amount of material covered during the course. The exam software would be in closed format, with a word limit imposed for those typing or a set number of blue book pages for those hand writing. The test would be one that every student could easily finish in the time allotted. This style of exam would also minimize problems that occur when a student's computer malfunctions- which has happened in several of my exams.

I am sure there are students who would argue that my suggestion is also an unfair exam style. We are in training to be lawyers, after all. And personally, I will defend the multiple choice exam format, though I can see the other side's point.

Part of this blog entry is just me venting some of the ideas and emotions I felt during the stress of exam season. But at the end of the day, all of the students at Florida State Law are in a pretty good position. The style of an exam is a petty thing to bicker about when millions of gallons of oil are beginning to hit the Gulf Coast. There are thousands if not millions of people who would trade places with the students at Florida State Law, who would instantly trade the pressures and stresses of their own lives for the pressure of doing well on school exams. If the format of a law school exam is all I have to complain about in my life, then I should not be complaining at all.

Until Next Time,

Nathan Marshburn