It’s hard to be on the receiving end of a poor grade, and there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s hard to understand and even harder to explain how hundreds of hours spent in attending classes, reading required materials, diligently writing case briefs, and preparing a course outline could possibly result in a low grade. But it can and it does, leaving you feeling bewildered, disheartened, and somewhat betrayed. So we're not about to minimize your disappointment if you received a low grade – it really hurts – but what matters now is what you learn from the experience. It’s okay to take a couple of days off to console yourself, but absolutely no more. We must get back to work. Only now, we work differently.
It’s not enough to go through the exercise of looking over the exam with your professor or comparing what you’ve written to a sample answer – you need to know why what you wrote on the exam that didn’t earn the grade you think it deserved. To do this, we need to get inside your head to see where what you were thinking departed from what you should have been thinking.
First, reviewing your exam with your professor is essential to developing your written communication skills. If you think about it, your primary interaction with your professor thus far has been primarily oral – either you were called upon in class or you met outside of class to talk about the material. What you’ll learn from your written exam will probably surprise you. For example, you might learn that you “knew the law" but failed to receive credit because your answer wasn’t responsive to the professor’s question. Or you might discover that your reading of the problem was so flawed that you added your own facts or misconstrued them, either of which could have led to disappointing results. Only by meeting with your professor to go over the exam will you get a sense of how your thinking and response to the questions differed from what your professor had in mind.
From there, it is absolutely essential to learn how to help yourself. Not only are you in the best position to assess your own learning issues, but you are the only one who knows what you know and what you don’t. While it’s helpful to listen to questions asked by other students both in and out of class, it’s not always the question you need answered. Sometimes, you may find difficulty in framing the very question you need to ask. This is a very common problem. After all, articulating a question presupposes that you have a solid enough understanding of the material to identify the part you don’t understand. In short, you need to understand what it is you don’t know before you can get the help you need.
It’s possible to get sufficient insight into what you don’t understand to allow you to articulate the questions you need to ask. This requires some work on your part, but work that is well worth the effort because it puts you in control. Here, we have something concrete to work with – you can use what you wrote on your exam and your professor’s responses to it. Things to pay attention to include whether you are missing a discussion of the law, missing issues, relying on conclusory statements, lack an IRAC form, lack organization, or straying from the relevant issue. Each of these issues (and many more) can be fixed, and are discussed in depth in Chapter Eight of Professor Darrow-Kleinhaus' book, Mastering the Law School Exam.
While we might have moved quickly through what to do to improve, it is important to remember that there’s still a great deal which you can do to affect the final outcome. We know it’s not easy to get your energy and enthusiasm back after a disappointing grade but you must. By following the suggestions and approaches we’ve touched on here, as well as following the suggestions that are discussed in depth in Mastering the Law School Exam, you’ll be able to make the changes necessary in your studying, your thinking, and your writing to achieve the success your hardwork deserves. The key is that you go forward doing things differently than you did before. That’s the real point of what we’ve been doing – learning how to do things differently so you’ll achieve a different result.
And, as always, we are here to help!
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