Getting ready for a long trip, have you ever get packed the night before, make sure you have everything, check the vehicle and make sure you've gassed up, then get a good night sleep and wake up at 5am ready to go...only to have an accident happen on your main route and you may as well have slept till noon because you're stuck in traffic anyway? Yeah. Kinda like that.
If I catch that prof in the street, there will be some furniture moving I tell you that. Last night I took the last exam for the shortened summer semester. I'd taken the other exam last week and felt good about it, reading through the problems and classifying them all quickly, then going back and articulating clearly and in a efficient fashion my answers. It was how an exam should have felt.
So last night I felt good. I had the book (it was an open book test), the supplemental book with the Rules governing this section of law, in addition I'd gone though my class notes and picked out the specific rules we'd touched on in class and typed them all out just to be sure. Eleven pages. In addition I had ALL my class notes, a separate quick summary of the whole class and all issues touched, and had been going over it for three days. I'd done the readings (one bad weekend I missed one but I made it up) during the semester, in class I'd participated frequently giving good answers, thought I understood what he was talking about, and was ready to whip out my knowledge and rub it all over the page.
Five minutes into the test I was about the stand up and start cursing folks out.
photo from sodahead.comLet me state this clearly: Since the law is rarely clear cut or absolute, it makes no sense to create a multiple choice test that requires clear and absolute answers. And yet there they were, multiple choice questions.
Which would have been no issue, after all I'd read the material backwards and forwards and reviewed throughly. But then all of that is worthless when the questions appeared to have been generated by Random Test Question Maker 2000, and only marginally cover the subject you studied. It was a three hour exam and the few - less than 25 - multiple choice questions took up nearly 2 hours of the allotted time.
The essay question was by comparison very easy. I argued both sides of the situation, point by point and notated each rule and how it would be effective in turn. I was quite proud of that part.
Afterwards during the often warned against post mortem that occurs after every test, classmates gathered in the hall, everyone looked at each other with confusion regarding those mysterious multiple choice questions. The question of where they came from, why the bulk of them covered a single section and why the choices given seemed so random in and of themselves was everyone's lips. One can only hope that it bodes well for the curve.
I'd hoped this summer to be the start of my tighten up tour, as my previous two semesters had been less than what I'd hoped to achieve. I spoke to my brother earlier today and suddenly he knows a litany of one year law students who threw in the towel, a concept heretofore unmentioned in my evaluation for law school or any conversation we'd had before. Now he tells me? I wonder if friends and family said the same to them as they say to me now.
I didn't start this with the purest of heart, I will admit. But I've never been a quitter. Or an abject failure. And my dinner with Sporty from a weeks ago is still resonating in my mind, in that maybe my priorities job/school wise need to be examined. If I'm gonna do this, and I'm pretty much in it, something has got to give. The world is a funny place.
Barkeep...I got one more done. Break out the Champipple!
No comments:
Post a Comment