Final #1- RECAP

Sooo, the long awaited day finally came. First final! An early morning one, wooo. I tried to get to bed at a reasonable hour because, y'know, cramming at that point probably isn't gonna change much and being able to think rationally and coherently is probably more important than a few hours of extra studying. Unfortunately, whether it was due to anxiety or what, I tossed and turned for quite some time before falling asleep. I woke up early too, so the end result was probably around 5 hours of sleep. I felt REALLY alert though, the adrenaline was pumping before I even woke up.

So I get ready with all my little snacks and drinks (Chocolate! Mwahahahaha) and eventually end up in a room with part of my class. It's a 4 hour exam.

Right away I make the mistake of tackling the biggest problem first. I was thinking to myself, "Self, what you don't want to do is do the small ones first and then run out of time on the big question worth the most points and have to rush that"

POOR MOVE SELF

Ok, well, that might be a good idea for some people, but my brain wasn't really wanting to be smart and think analytically and all quite yet, so it was probably a huge mistake to tackle the most complicated and intricate problem first that was worth like, half the exam. Ooooooops? It would have been a better idea to tackle one of the smaller problems first just to get the whole noggin warmed up (kinda cold today).

Nevertheless, I did the 50% problem first. I remember starting to read the fact pattern and making notes to myself and then starting to outline my answer. By the time I was done with all that I looked at the time and WHAT?!??! 30 MINUTES WERE GONE.

I started to panic a little bit. I drank a lot of water and tried to connect the facts and whatnot to the legal concepts we had learned. I don't want to go into details that much, but let's just say...
1) Could have prepared more
2) could have prepared better
3) could have done better

But, it's over now, so no use regretting it. Like I said yesterday, this semester has definitely been a lot of help in determining what the heck I should be doing to properly prepare for class and finals. More on that later.

I pounded that thing out and hit the word limit about an hour and a half into the exam (word limit = in the middle 2000's, so doing that in about an hour = wait... is that even possible am I not remembering? Oh well, don't care) I tried to finesse with it a bit and then moved on to another problem. It was a much smaller, less complex, yet still hard as hell problem, which took about 50 minutes. If you're keeping track I have like 1:30 left at this point. I tackle a more complicated problem which eats up about another hour. With the remaining 30 minutes, I go over the last problem because the world limit is... WAY INSUFFICIENT. Holy cow, I was like 150 words over! And the world limit was in the middle 1000's, so that was a sizeable chunk. I had all this time I could have spent on both of the complicated essays, but I ran out of space. Clearly I had a lot of superfluous fluff in there. Oye.

Anyways, I think what I learned from this is to uh, start earlier and know the elements of legal principles better. I could picture that stuff on my outline, I just blanked on a few things. I think a big problem with closed book is that if you tell me a case name it usually jogs my memory enough for me to recall the facts and holding, but without that little prompt it's wayy harder for me to pull it out of thin air. Anyways, thank goodness that's over with.