Are you smarter than...

a 5th grader? I hope so. When it comes to law I quite possibly am. And this conviction has been confirmed when I got my first ever U.S. law school exam results back. This was in a class specifically for foreign lawyers trying to get a handle on the chaos they dare calling a legal system here, so I guess it wasn't as authentic as if I took it in any other class but still. It felt nice.

The troubling part was to see how much people have prepared and still ended up with a C or even C-. The prof constantly said everyone should prepare their outlines for each class in advance because it would be crucial when it comes to the test. (Of course we couldn't use them, as this was a closed book exam.) I suspect a lot of people have fallen behind with their outlines and instead of studying from the textbook they first rushed to finish their notes and then learned from those. In the meantime, I managed to read the book five times. They may have missed a whole lot of important parts in their papers and may also have misunderstood important concepts, which, in turn, they incorrectly studied from their papers.

I'm not much of an "outline guy" myself. I got through five years of law school with preparing no more than 3 outlines (as far as I can remember) two of which were for the final exams at the very end. (I simply didn't like the notes I managed to gather from other more diligent people.)

So, I'm anxious to see how many people will abandon their outlines. And how I will do on the REAL law school exams (and the one that I'll have at the business school with quite negligible background in economics.)

P.S.: I'll try to stop being such a nerd from now on. :)