Top 5 Strategies for Excelling in Law School Essay Exams

In many law-school courses, your performance on one essay exam determines your entire grade. So, how can you make the most of your one chance to prove all that you’ve learned over the semester? 

Here are 5 strategies for achieving essay-exam excellence.  

Each essay question will typically begin with a fact pattern that describes a scenario or interaction, followed by a prompt that will tell you how your professor wants you to frame your essay answer. 

The prompt might simply ask you to identify and analyze all of the legal issues raised by the fact pattern. Or, it might ask you to play the role of an attorney, law clerk, or other advisor and analyze some or all of the issues in the fact pattern for a client or your boss.

Because the prompt gives you the best idea of what your professor wants to see in your answer, it’s the best place to start when you’re reading the question. That means it’s okay to skip over the fact pattern at first and take a minute to read the prompt instead. Once you’ve read the prompt carefully and understand what you’re being asked to do, you can turn your attention back to the fact pattern and start digging in.

Essay-exam fact patterns are usually lengthy and complex by design because you’re being tested on your ability to spot the legally significant facts and relevant issues. The best way to tackle the complexity is by reading the fact pattern straight through once to get a general sense of what’s going on. Then, read it again, sentence by sentence, and ask yourself why you’re being given each piece of information. Underline or make notes about facts that seem relevant and any potential legal issues raised by those facts.

As you read, pay close attention to things like dates, interactions or quoted dialogue between the characters, excerpts from documents, and any quoted statutory language. If your professor is including those types of details in the fact pattern, there’s a good chance that they’ll be important to your analysis. 

However, keep in mind that your professor might include irrelevant facts in the fact pattern to try and distract you from the real issues. Remembering the prompt can help you identify and disregard irrelevant details so they don’t lead you astray or clutter your analysis. 

Once you’ve actively and carefully read through the fact pattern, you’re ready to start the writing process. But that doesn’t mean diving right into your first sentence. Instead, start by creating a quick outline for your answer. Outlining helps you organize your thoughts, structure your essay, and ensure that you have a plan to cover all the necessary pieces of your analysis. 

You likely won’t have time to write a thorough outline that covers every point of your essay in full, and that’s alright. Your outline doesn’t need to be detailed to be effective. But at a minimum, your outline should include one section for each legal issue you’ve spotted. Each section should include a quick statement of the relevant rule, a list of the relevant facts, and a quick sketch of your conclusion on that issue.

Once you’ve outlined your answer, it’s time to start writing. When writing your essay, your goal is not only to get the right answer but also to discuss each issue in a way that allows your professor to see that you know the relevant legal rules and understand how to apply them. Presenting a clear, thorough, readable analysis is the best way to maximize your exam score.

One way to ensure that your answer is reader-friendly is by following the IRAC formula or a similar formula, like CRAC or CREAC. These formulas allow you to clearly identify the legal problem you’ll be discussing in each section of your essay, state and explain the relevant legal principles, apply those legal principles to specific facts from the fact pattern, and state your conclusion. The result is a well-structured essay that leads your professor step-by-step through your analysis.

In addition to following a straightforward structural formula, other tips for making your writing reader-friendly include using short paragraphs throughout your essay, using headings and transition words, and proofreading your answer once you’re done to ensure that your writing doesn’t contain any distracting mistakes or typos.  

Time management is critical for successful exam-taking. You have only a set amount of time to take your essay exam, and you’ll want to make sure you have enough time to analyze every issue you need to. You’ll earn more points by analyzing every relevant issue than by analyzing one issue so thoroughly that you run out of time to discuss anything else.

You should know before exam day how much time you’ll have for the exam. If you know how many questions your professor plans to ask on the exam, you can set a plan in advance for how you’ll budget your time between reading the prompt and fact pattern, outlining, and writing. Even if you don’t know the number of questions in advance, it’s still a good idea to plan a rough time budget that you can use to keep yourself on track during the exam.

Are you ready to start practicing these strategies? Quimbee’s practice-exam library includes 219 practice exams and model answers written by real law professors, all designed to emulate the types of questions you’ll see on exam day. Taking timed practice exams and thoroughly reviewing model answers is the best way to ensure that you’re confident in your essay-writing skills and ready to excel in your exams.