3 Tricks to Get your 1L Professors to Award you Top Grades

As you can imagine, professors have a lot of exams to grade within a short window of time. With the registrars office on their case to submit the exams on time and their families demanding holiday and family time, it’s your exam grade that weighs in the balance. Knowing these realities, it’s up to you to implement proven strategies to get your exam noticed.

ORGANIZATION. Every great novelist knows that his first sentence must grab the reader’s attention. Organizing your essay into punchy paragraphs with strong headings is the attention grabber you need. Too often students bury their best work inside never-ending paragraphs. Now that you know you are competing against the whimsical Christmas holiday and a professor under an annoying time demand, you can see why it’s best not to make matters worse by submitting an exam that’s hard to read.

Here’s what you should do. For every topic you address make a short heading or issue statement. It can be in the form of a question such as, “Can Super Cool prevail on a Negligence claim against Target who employed the Security Guard Big Steve?”. You can even write something shorter like, “Super Cool’s Negligence Claim.”

The key is to create a topic heading that tells the reader exactly what the proceeding paragraphs address. By quickly pointing out to your professor that you are discussing Negligence, now your professor can skim your succeeding paragraphs to see if you analyze all of the sub-topics or legal elements that are being tested within the larger Negligence topic. Nothing is buried and your exam is easy to follow and actually helps the professor meet the demands of their busy schedule. As you can see, headings can do just the trick.

POLICY, POLICY, POLICY. On a law school exam, flattery will get you everywhere. Most professors are intellectuals. They love ideas and nuances. It is in your best interest to organize the types of policy considerations they mentioned in class into a specific section of the outline you will study from. I actually have my private clients create an outline that connects these policy considerations right beside the rule elements they most relate to. However you go about it, be sure that on any exam answer, you sprinkle your professor’s policy interest into your response.

In practical terms what this means is that you cannot afford to think of writing policy analysis as something left exclusively for a “Policy question”. That is a classic 1L mistake. There is more to be said on policy and here is a good place to begin.

PARAGRAPHING. There should be treasure troves of magic words loosely scattered in each of your punchy paragraphs. Again short paragraphs, related to the topic or issue headings you raise, are key to organization. The other purpose of these paragraphs is to serve as a stage for what I call the magic words. With your reading audience focused on the stage, you know must litter your argument or analysis section with all of the key words and terms that will earn you points. For instance, on most Tort exams, when you are tested on Negligence there are likely to be a lot of points for terms such as duty, reasonable person, Learned Hand Formula, Palsgraf, heightened standard of care, but for test and the list goes on. You must be sure to use the hot button terms your professor is looking for in your paragraphs.

Over the years I have noticed that professors will distribute a previous student’s answer to a past exam as a model answer. On a close read you will find that the exam has more than a few mistakes of legal application. You might ask, “why did this student do so well if they made obvious mistakes?”

Let me explain. Because most professors do not read exams line by line, not all of a student’s errors will be caught. Add in the pressure of the registrar and holiday demands and you have the recipe for a professor who doesn’t have the time to read every exam with a fine toothed comb. However, since this exam sprinkled many of the terms and key words throughout the analysis that the professor was looking for, it was forgiven for some of its lackluster legal application.

While we may look at this student as having been lucky, it wasn’t really luck at all. It was strategy. Each semester I tell stories like this to students who attend THE Club’s exam prep seminars and they often email me because they are happy that they were able to avert these common pitfalls.

You too can do well this semester if you approach exams strategically. Think of your exam as an opportunity to help your professor meet their professional deadline as well as their holiday commitments. By helping to serve your professor’s interest, you will also meet your academic goals.