Law Express: Exam Success ePub eBook

Emily Finch, Stefan Fafinski

• Publisher: Pearson
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781292018072
• Edition: 2

"Law Express: Exam Success is a student’s best friend. It gives tips on writing in examinations and the revision process. Highly recommended." James Hankinson, law student, Cardiff University
From the makers of the best-selling Law Express revision series comes the new Law Express guide to Exam Success! Filled with helpful revision strategies and top exam tips, this guide is designed to help you from day one of your revision right up until the final moment of your exam. Discover the tips, techniques and strategies that can significantly improve your performance when it counts.

Chapter 1

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Law exams and you

Revision checklist

Topics covered in this chapter:

• Understanding the purpose of exams
• Types of law exams: open and closed book, seen and unseen exams
• Different types of questions: essays, problems, case notes, short answer questions
• Individual learning styles and their impact on revision

Introduction

The first step towards achieving success in exams is to understand their purpose. Once you appreciate what it is that exams are designed to test, you will be able to tailor your revision to ensure that you enter the exam room equipped to produce answers that satisfy the requirements of the exam and impress your examiners. This chapter starts by explaining the purpose of exams and moves on to outline the different formats of exam that you might encounter and the types of question that may arise, with tips on how to tackle them. The final section of this chapter explains the different types of intelligence that exist and how this might affect the way that you approach revision.

The purpose of exams

The easiest way to explain the purpose of exams as a method of assessment is to draw an analogy with two unrelated situations: a medical examination and a sporting event.

The purpose of a medical examination is for the doctor to assess whether the patient has a particular condition and, if so, how far it has developed. In other words, it establishes the presence and extent of a disease. Similarly, the purpose of an exam is to determine the presence and extent of the candidate’s legal knowledge.

A parallel can be drawn between exams and a big sporting event. After months of preparation, competitors/students are tested to see which of them is able to produce the most impressive performance under pressure. This allows competitors/students to be ranked in order of the quality of their performance.

In essence, then, the purpose of the exams is to determine how much each student knows about each particular area of law to enable the university to make a distinction between students on the basis of their knowledge and ability.

However, many students do not understand the value of exams as a method of assessment:

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

I hate exams. I can’t see the point of them. All you do is memorise things from a book and regurgitate them in the exam. It isn’t a test of knowledge, just of memory and that is pointless because solicitors and barristers aren’t expected to remember the law; they just look it up. They’re also unfair because most students end up with much worse marks than they do for their coursework.

Matt

This quotation sums up three of the commonest criticisms that students make about the use of exams as a method of assessment in law:

• Exams are a test of memory rather than a means of measuring knowledge.
• Their emphasis on the ability to memorise the law is irrelevant to the reality of legal practice.
• Exams are more challenging and result in lower marks for most students.

Although these views are commonly held, they are inaccurate, as will be explained in the sections that follow.

Memory versus knowledge

Exams are not designed to be a test of memory: their purpose is to test knowledge. The brain processes and stores information differently, depending upon whether or not it has been understood. If you understand an area of law, it is stored in the brain as knowledge where it takes up less room and can be more easily retrieved than law which has not been understood but which has been committed to memory. This means that students who have memorised law that they do not understand have far fewer resources to draw upon in the exam than students who have understood the law and have far more detailed knowledge stored in their brain.

Students often equate memory and knowledge, thinking that the ability to remember and reproduce accurate statements of the law is a method of demonstrating knowledge. However, examiners are looking for answers that show understanding of the law, rather than answers that are made up of points that have been memorised. Understanding is expressed by an ability to explain the law in your own words and to use it in a flexible way to respond to the requirements of the question. Students who are relying on memorised information tend to struggle to produce answers with either of these characteristics.

Lecturer viewpoint

There is a qualitative difference between answers based on understanding of the law and those that are made up of a series of memorised points. The latter attract very little credit. What we are looking for is reasoned analysis and application of the law to the particular question: that shows that students know how to use it rather than just know what it is.

So although the importance of remembering the law that you have learned might make it seem as if exams are all about memory, this is not the case. Do not use memorisation as a substitute for knowledge. The two things are very different and the distinction is highly visible to examiners.

Academic law versus law in practice

Whilst it is true that lawyers in practice are not expected to work from memory, it is important to remember that a law degree is not designed to prepare students for practice or to replicate the conditions in which solicitors and barristers work. The academic study of the law is intended to provide a general grounding in the law and, as in other academic subjects, exams are used as one of the main methods of assessment.

Although law is studied as an academic discipline at undergraduate level, the use of exams as a method of assessment makes a positive contribution to equipping students to enter into legal practice. One of the key pedagogic justifications for the use of unseen exams (that is, exams where the questions are not released to students prior to their entry into the exam room) is that it stimulates and motivates student learning across the entire syllabus of any particular subject. In other words, students do not know what topics will be examined so the sensible approach to revision to ensure preparedness for the exam is to revise a significant proportion of the material covered in each module. By way of comparison, assessment by coursework requires a sustained focus on a single topic, so does not promote breadth of knowledge in the same way as assessment by exam.

Exams versus coursework

Many students do find that they receive lower marks for exams than for coursework. This should not be taken to mean that exams are harder than coursework, but that each method of assessment sets out to test different things and students generally tend to be better at meeting the objectives of coursework. Most students seem to prefer coursework to exams.

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

I prefer coursework to exams. With coursework, you are able to complete the work with the resources to hand at your own leisure and the grade you receive is the grade you deserve. With exams, you could have revised for many weeks or months but then panic on the day and not do as well as you could have – therefore your potential is not reflected as well.

Samuel

I prefer exams to coursework. I’m better at exams but I’m not sure why!

Nancy

I used to think that I was much better at coursework than exams as my marks were about 10–15 per cent better in coursework. Then I realised that the way that I approached exams was wrong so I made a lot of changes to the way that I revised and now my marks are pretty much the same for exams and coursework.

Louise

There would be no point in having two methods of assessment if coursework and assessment had the same objectives and tested students in the same way.

Types of law exam

The sections that follow will introduce the various types of exam that you might encounter and provide some guidance on how to adapt your approach to revision to suit their requirements.

Seen and unseen exams

The most usual method of assessment in undergraduate law is the unseen paper. This is an exam in which students do not have any advance knowledge about the topics that will be examined and the questions that will be asked about them. This can be distinguished from a seen exam (also known as a pre-release paper) in which the paper is given to students prior to the exam to enable them to prepare with full knowledge of the questions.

Preparing for a seen exam

Clearly, the business of revising for an exam will differ dramatically, depending upon whether you are preparing for a seen or unseen paper. Knowledge of the questions prior to the exam facilitates targeted revision and enables students to focus their attention on the topics that are certain to appear on the paper. Students preparing for a seen exam paper not only have an opportunity to tailor their revision to the content of the exam but are also able to carry out research and plan their answers. All that is required is that this information is retained until the exam, as it is generally the case that materials are not permitted in the exam room. A final point to remember about a seen exam paper is that the examiners will expect a higher standard of answer as students have had advance knowledge of the questions.

Preparing for an unseen exam

By contrast, preparation for an unseen paper is speculative and necessitates that students revise more topics than there are questions to be answered to ensure that they will be able to answer the required number of questions. A student who revises four topics in preparation for an unseen exam paper that requires that four questions are answered runs a risk of being caught out if one (or more) of their topics does not come up on the paper or the question asked about the topic is one that they cannot tackle.

Open and closed book exams

The most usual method of assessment in undergraduate law is the closed book exam. In this style of exam, students are not permitted to take any materials into the exam room to consult when preparing their answers (except in some cases – but not all – a statute book). By contrast, students sitting ...