Personal Property Law is going to be the death of me. Argh. The course isn't THAT difficult, but for the first time, i'm dealing with a substantive 8 credit open-book exam module without any muggers...and without Coco's help too. Which means that my lousy note-taking skills are coming back to haunt me.
Since i have no muggers and stuff to help me, i must depend on the Professor to be organised and not jump from point to point. But he jumps about a lot. And he must give me a clear impression on what is important for us to know and what isn't. He doesn't...in fact he goes off on so many flights of fancy and pointless side-points that i wonder if he's in it to teach us or to just show off. His examples help, but there are just too many of them...and i need to internalise the examples and bring only the bare notes into the exam hall but now my notes are voluminous and i really don't know how i'm going to refer to case names and stuff like that when my notes are 25 pages long and not 3 pages long per chapter. I just record everything and i can't help but think that everything is important. Yup, i'm just a perfectionist in a very bad way.
I was planning to organise my notes at the end of each lesson, but then i just got flooded by readings and only gave myself this short period of 4 days to study AND tidy up my notes AND create exam-worthy quick-reference notes. And after two days, i've only done ONE chapter out of seven. Yup, you heard it right...ONE.
And i didn't even tidy up my notes or create those quick-reference notes, all i did was study the material and add in all the things that the Prof missed out on. Actually, now that i think about it, the course IS very difficult - the topic that killed me for two days, on Negotiable Instruments, has so many statutory rules that i can barely remember a third of them. He tells us to just flip through the readings, but THERE IS NO WAY I CAN FLIP THROUGH THE READINGS AND ABSORB ANYTHING. There are only about 75-100 pages per chapter, but i usually have to stare at a sentence for 10 seconds each (and important and complicated sentences take me over a minute) before i process the sentence. Are there people who can rush through readings and still absorb? Well, maybe that's why i just deserve to suck forever as a student and as a lawyer?
And if the professor had his way, i shouldn't even be doing law. He tells us that he "flattens the bell-curve", so that more students get As and even more students get Cs (B-/B is the average). He noted expressly that this is because it'll let us know early on if we're cut out for practice, so that the weaker students can "quit earlier"...after all, "who wants to be a lawyer working in Chinatown, doing small claims, defending petty crime suspects, and having trouble earning money?" All lawyers get jobs after graduating my ass.
I'd actually accept what he says, except that i really don't see how being bad at summarising sentences and organising notes is going to hamper my law career much. When i interned at Wong P and A&G, i did fine at my tasks and got on well with my bosses. I never had to do any summarising and when i had to take notes i was always given time to get them in order. And the notes didn't have to be so damn short because i was working in the corporate department and my notes were FINE. Legible, easy to understand, and most of all THOROUGH.
Even litigators don't use cue cards anyway, when i worked for a Senior Counsel, she read verbatim from a printed page for her submissions...did she need to use summarised notes and get all dramatic? No. I saw myself doing a lot of reasoning and problem solving (mostly practical problems, not legal ones) while interning, however. And using my EQ and being sensitive, polite, and occasionally funny too. And, after all this time at law school, i still like to think that i'm above average at those skills. I DO admit, however, that speed-reading skills are very important.
Closed-book exams are said to be bad because then the exam becomes a memorising exercise. But honestly, open-book is no better. Because in the bell-curve setting, the competition heats up so much that, to do well, you have to summarise and organise like crazy to make your notes easily referable. And to write a high-quality essay in your exam, you have to spot the question and type the whole damn thing out beforehand to have a shot at an A. I'd have trouble doing all that even if i get another week to study.
And although not having note-taking and summarising skills isn't going to hamper my legal career (in my opinion), my GRADES definitely are going to influence where i end up. Oh yeah, and despite impressing a senior partner at A&G enough that she told me via email that i was "good" and "should have no problem getting a pupillage position (at A&G)"...no, i'm not going to get into A&G because i'm not going to graduate with 2nd upper honours. And, unless i have some special connections (which i do not have), i'm not going to get into any of the big firms anyway. My only A so far in law school has been for a mock paper at closed-book Legal Theory (which degraded to a B+ at the actual exam) and i really don't see myself getting the B/B+ average that i need to mount a credible push for 2nd upper honours in this semester or the next.
Well, i'm so dead. Don't ever do this module unless you don't care about how your grades turn out. Or unless you're one of those students whose can spend all day in the library speed-reading and summarising. I'm going to to sleep now; part of me hopes that i don't wake up.
