Exams...What do you think about them?

"... exams play on a law student’s world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they’re at a distance, they serve merely to create the tension which swell daily like tides – to read, to keep pace, to understand. As exams draw close.... their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces...

We were all stopping each other now at lunch, in the hallways, to ask questions about cases and concepts we’d covered at the beginning of the term. And the study groups were growing more active. Some people preferred to work alone, either because they did not want to rely on others, or simply because they felt they learned better independently. But by now, most of the members of the section had found their way into groups, almost all of which were meeting a number of times every week to swap information and outlines and to work out past tests.

As we entered the last week of the term... most of the students at the law school seemed to abandon any effort to maintain a brave front in the face of exams. The evidence of great apprehension was wide spread. Whenever I visited the library, there were long lines before each of the Xerox machines, as people waited to copy earlier editions of the red books or Law Review articles which were said to offer particularly trenchant digests of the material in various courses. Everybody around the school seemed to be fretting aloud that they would never catch up in their class work in time to make a thorough review..."

( adapted from Scott Turow. One L. Warner Books, 1988 )

Questions for Discussion:

Exams are a waste of time! All they measure is how good you are at memorizing things.

Exams are important. They test how well you take in information and how you manage to
interpret it and put it to use.