Customer Reviews

The Eight Secrets Of Top Exam Performance In Law School: An Easy-To-Use, Step-by-Step Program for Achieving Great Grades!

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a good book for pre-law students and 1Ls. It gives some basic advice about how to think about and write law school exams. However, I have one big caveat, there is not a "secret" to law school test taking. The keys are to know the black-letter law cold, and to be precise and concise in your analysis, and to practice taking tests under test conditions as much as possible. This book is a good quick read for those who have never taken a law school test, or who did not perform as well as they would have liked. For those who did do well on tests this book will not provide much, if any, useful information.

This is the most important book you will read in all of law school and I have the stats to prove it. I read this book after three semesters of law school on the recommendation of a friend who said it worked - she was in the top 5% of the class - I in the top 60% YUCK! My GPA to that point was a weak 2.89. For each of the remaining three semesters that I used the techniques from the book I made the deans list and my GPA averege for those semesters was a 3.6. My last semester of law school I got all A's and one B+. Use these techniques and good luck!

I was surprised that Professor Whitehead sold out to such a poor product in an obvious quick profit job through marketing and an attention-grabbing title. Weak. The whole premise of this book is based on a dangerous idea that there are eight magical steps in "the" formulae for success. This is something you might want to read while waiting in line somewhere, as there's not much thought to it; however, I would recommend borrowing it as it's not worth paying any money for... Unbelievable hoax and another attempt to gouge poor, impressionable 1L's who don't know what to expect and are willing to buy into the magic formulae idea, the quick-fix approach. This "book" is so short and simple, it's something that I'd expect to see as a "how-to" on the internet for free. It's barely enough to make a pamphlet but it's printed in big font with huge, patronizing pages with the numbered steps. I paid...for some law professor (teaches at USC, does the Gilbert's Law School Legends series for Criminal Law and Procedure, which are actually much better products)to tell me that I need to issue-spot, mind how much time I'm spending on the questions, organize my answers, and listen for what your specific professor might test you on....it's so belittling. Don't bother.

Reading this book, I am reminded of the admonition in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Don't Panic!" This book is filled with useless to exhortations to "stay calm" and that "panic is your enemy." But while this is all well and good, Whitebread, unfortunately, tells you little that will actually help you remain calm come exam time. Here are the basic flaws: First, this book is way too brief. Seventy pages may be easy to read the week before the exam, but in reality this will do you very little good when you are actually asked to apply these techniques. Second, Whitebread does not stress and restress the fact that it will require much practice to successfully use the techniques he describes. Third, scant attention is paid to atypical types of exams. If you get one of the rare "policy" type exams, you're in trouble! Still, Whitebread does give a lot of tips here and there they may prove useful sometime. Bottom line: Is the book worth 8 bucks? Probably not. And if this is your only guide to writing "top" exams, then you better either be one of those with a knack for writing, or satisfied with a "B". One last thought: should you buy this book, you must practice and practice and practice each of these techniques before you can really count on them.

As noted by other reviewers, the book is short, and I would add, as useless as it is brief. Wait until the author appears at your school to get a free copy. Spend your money on "Getting to Maybe" or taking the excellent LEEWS exam short-course. You may know the law, but without the ability to express it in the expected format in an organized manner at warp speed, you will find many doors closed to you forever. You will hear Whitebread's truisms a hundred times, but there is too little specificity here to help your performance.

I was impressed by the clarity of the explanations of how to take a law school exam. There were no convoluted or complex ideas to digest. I wish I had found the book before my first semester tests...after reading the book I am thinking...so that is what the professors meant about subissues and IRACing them! In conclusion: If you are a first year law student get the book immediately. It will help you in your studies.

Charles H. Whitebread's short treatise on how to achieve high grades in law school exams is a bit ambiguous in many instances and does not provide concrete examples of how one might actually outline through the IRAC (issues, rule, analysis, conclusion) method. Yes, he does talk about how one might start writing, but it would have been helpful if he had an actual outline of a real law school exam. If he had done so, I am sure this book would have been much more useful to first year law students who do not have the benefit of knowing what to expect.

However, many of his tips are important: for instance: (1) do not start writing the moment you are able to; instead, outline your case, which may take twenty minutes, and spend the next fourty minutes out of your hour writing in a clear, organized manner. The person who just starts writing without organization will get a poorer grade. (2) He says never to explain why you cannot finish on your test. Some professors won't know you were not able to finish unless you said so. Plus, you get no points for admitting your error, so why bother? (3) As long as you stick to the main points in the course, and don't focus on minute details, you probably will get an A or a B. Sounds good to me.

Michael Gordon

And if you're a law student worried about your grades, by all means grab a copy of this little book. The advice is sound, although (as other reviewers have noted) you'll need to practice like heck if you want it to help you.

Frankly, though, this little book will be of most help to the people who need it least -- namely, One-Ls who are already devoting all of their time and attention to their studies, hanging out with each other, talking about the law together, writing outlines together, working sample problems together, and so forth. If you don't or can't do that stuff, this book may help you a little bit, but it won't help you much. And if you _do_ do that stuff, this book will add almost nothing to what you're already doing.

I don't want to minimize the importance of grades in law school, but the fact is that they few times anyone has checked, they haven't correlated at all with professional performance. (And you may already know that something like 85% of One-Ls finish their first year without getting a single A.) If you want As, I hope you get them -- and more power to you if you _do_ get them; they're a real achievement. But I really think the best thing to do is to quit worrying about your grades, relax, and just _learn_. In four or five years nobody is going to care what your first-year GPA was.

But you won't make it that far if you give yourself a heart attack before your second year. Law school _is_ tough; the standards are higher than any that most of us are used to, we're finally competing directly and solely against people whose academic records are at least as good as our own, and many of us who are used to getting As will turn out to be B students or lower. No book in the world is going to alter that.

So if your law school (like mine) passes out free copies of this book, by all means read it. But think twice before spending money on this book or any other that will tell you how to get high grades in law school.

Professor Whitebread's book is easy to understand and digest. Unlike many other law books on how to achieve success in law school, Professor Whitebread's commentary and test taking tips (including the practice examinations in the back chapters) are written with absolute clarity. Moreover, his common sense approach to succesful examinations takes the enigma out of law school test taking. I would recommend this book highly to law students as a primer for practical law school examination tips.

Professor Whitebread has been teaching for a long time, and of course, he has been to law school as a student. These simple tips will help you prepare to write a better exam answer. These simple tips will also make the difference is how you finish in the class.

His main idea is to apportion your time. Although this seems to go without saying, students still run out of time and neglect to answer all the questions. This is probably the biggest problem students have. From the book, and from my experience, be sure you strictly adhere to the time you set aside.

The professor also discusses what kind of answers you will want to avoid, which is why I wrote the subject line I did here. I made the mistake of reading the book after my exams and realized that I should have rephrased some of my answers. Policy reasons are a necessity in any answer, but the answer must avoid sounding conclusory. The reason for an exam is to explain your answer and show your work, not state what you think is obvious.

I would recommend reading this before going into finals and recommend rereading it before the next set of finals.