Was your final exam disorganized?

Lack of organization in your answers might be another issue that led to a less than stellar grade on an exam. There are many reasons why your exam could have been disorganized, but the bottom line is disorganization probably came from disorganized thinking.

The first question to ask is If the disorganization stemmed from an issue of not knowing the law or misstating the law. If you know that was not the issue, and you’ve done all the necessary prep work, and you’ve still come away with the dreaded “disorganized” comment on your test booklet, then it wasn’t so much a question of knowing the material, but rather how you handled the presentation. So let’s take a look at how we can impose some order.

First, you might want to ask yourself if taking a minute to outline your answer before you started writing would have helped you organize your answer. Even though it’s appropriate to jump right into the analysis once you start writing, it’s never a good idea to jump right into the writing without a plan. As Professor Darrow-Kleinhaus discussed in the chapter in Mastering the Law School Exam on exam writing, this means that you must spend some time outlining your answer beforewriting it. You need a few minutes after reading the problem to outline the issues and come up with an approach for handling them. In your exam, it might be obvious that the you had not spent the time necessary to construct a working outline, and it will be obvious from all that’s missing in the answer.

Next, it is important not to commingle parties or issues. Never, ever, commingle your parties or your issues. Each deserves and demands separate treatment. Also, it’s a sure bet your professor included multiple parties to test multiple areas of the law. You’re just missing the point (in more ways than one!) if you overlook this frequently used test strategy. Another reason you should avoid commingling is the possibility for error.

Another question you might want to ask is whether you used a "he said, she said" analysis that went horribly wrong. While this might be effective when used by an expert, the ping-pong patter of “he will argue, then she will argue” can be disastrous for inexperienced law students. The going back and forth between parties inevitably leads to problems since the writer has to
juggle as well as engage in legal analysis. These problems can be avoided by using subheadings, which would encourage separate discussions of each party with respect to the issues and the parties - in the beginning, it is important to focus on one point of view at a time and rely on the rule of law to organize your answer.

Remember, using the rules as an organizational tool leads to a more focused and complete analysis.