The crim exam is done. It was not so bad really. It was one of those exams where you get a a little confidence going in the first few questions, but then later in the exam you get questions where you think "hm ... this seems totally simple and obvious ... but I must be missing something ... "

Probably one of the worst things you can do in an exam situation is distrust your intuition. After days (weeks?) of preparation and sample-exam-taking, to get to the exam and be like "I'm pretty sure it's X, so I'll write Y' is a bad bet. I found myself doing it at one point, looking at a note on my outline and wondering "maybe that's wrong ..."

Then the little voice says dude it's in the outline! The outline was triple-checked with the notes & textbooks! Don't be hatin' the outline! OK, fair enough.

I did improve my outline format a lot from torts to crim. My torts outline was quite detailed and printed quite small. It ended up consolidating a lot of information I had memorized, so about half of it was useless as note material. For crim, I just made big checklists so that I wouldn't forget any of the necssary elements of certain defenses.

Right this minute I have a greater-than-normal interest in taking the day off but ... our last challenge awaits, the civil procedure exam.

16 Dec 04