- Okay, so you know that taking practice exams
are important in law school,
in fact it's one of the most important things
that you can do to ensure
that you get better grades in law school.
But there are a lot of subtle things
that you can do in the way that you take practice exams
to maximize their efficiency and ensure
that you do the best that you can on your final exam.
So in today's quick tip we're gonna help you
translate your practice into reality on your final,
so stick around.
(cheerful plucky music)
A lot of people have trouble recreating their success
in practice exams into the classroom
when their final exam comes around.
The trick is to take practice exams
under non-ideal conditions.
When you take a practice exam at home,
it's far too easy to take the exam
under perfectly ideal conditions,
to take your practice exam while you're sitting
in a really comfortable chair,
or where your apartment is dead silent
so it's the perfect time to take your practice exam,
or to take it after you've had breakfast
but before you have lunch, whenever you feel like it,
when you feel alert.
But the problem is when you take your final exam in class
on test day, none of those conditions will exist.
I guarantee it will not be perfectly quiet.
You probably won't be sitting in a comfortable chair,
it'll be in a hard plastic chair
with a desk in front of you.
You probably won't have had a great night's sleep
because you'll be under so much stress
and you'll be studying right beforehand.
You won't be 10 feet from the refrigerator
or the bathroom, the clock is gonna keep running
regardless of what is going on in your life.
There are real stakes on the line,
and that changes everything.
But there's a way that we can turn that to our advantage.
When you take a practice exam at home,
take it under more stressful situations.
Take the exam while there's music in the background,
while your roommates are going in and out
from your apartment, when there's some construction
on the road in front of you.
You can change the conditions that you get tested under
to make sure that it's more similar to
how you're going to be tested on the final exam.
You can make sure that if you start a practice exam
you barrel through it and you don't give yourself
the crutch of stopping the timer
to go do something else and coming back to it.
Go straight through, take the entire three-hour exam
in one go so that you don't have the advantage
of being rested for every individual section.
It's similar to the story of a famous
Russian Olympic power lifter who was used to performing
on his own schedule in a very quiet gym.
He would rest before his lift,
he would then choose when he'd try to do
the maximum amount of weight on his lift.
But when he got to the Olympics,
the judges tell you when you have to perform
and you only have a few seconds to go from zero to 60
to get your job done.
In the Olympics you don't really have a choice,
and it's the same way when you're taking practice exams.
For example, when I took the bar exam in California,
in Los Angeles, there was an earthquake
during the second portion of the bar exam.
Now the bar examiners, they didn't stop the timer
and I couldn't run under my desk.
I had to barrel through it.
I had to fight all of that adrenaline
that was running through my body and just focus on the test.
Luckily it wasn't a huge earthquake,
but there were a lot of people who were not from California
who were absolutely freaking out.
Being a native Californian,
the earthquake wasn't much of an issue for me
and I just kept going on, and I feel like
that gave me an advantage during the earthquake,
during the bar exam.
It's the same way during tests in law school.
If you continually take practice exams
under ideal conditions,
you are setting yourself up for disaster
because the real test won't be
anything like how you practice.
So practice with distracting music.
Take a practice exam with other people in the room.
Use a timer and don't cheat.
It's far too easy to give yourself a few extra minutes.
Don't break up the test,
do the whole thing in one sitting.
And find a way to put real stakes on the line.
The Greek poet Archilochus said,
"We do not rise to the level of our expectations,
"we fall to the level of our training."
Don't let the conditions on test day throw you off.
Train in ways that are sub-optimal
so that when you're under real testing conditions
you do as well as you possibly can.
If you like this video, please click like and subscribe
down below, and in fact we have a link
to our guide on hacking law school down below.
And as always, stick around until next time
where we give you more tips on how to crush law school
here at Legal Eagle, see you next time.
(upbeat music)
But in today's quick tip, bleh.
There are a lot of subtle tricks
that you could use to do. (sighs)
In law school. (grumbles)
But the problem is that.
But the problem is.
Okay.
Uh, let me do that again.