January 18, 2017

My First A in Law School

how to get an A in law school | brazenandbrunette.com

If you were reading about this post from a college blogger, it would be full of advice about studying a little every day instead of cramming, getting a good night's rest instead of pulling all nighters, and reading the textbook instead of just reading the slides. Unfortunately, even if you do all of that in law school you'll probably only get a C+ or maybe a B- if you're lucky. Yes the studying in law school and college has the same concept, but that's like saying that a chicken is a dinosaur — they might be related but one is much meaner and scarier. 

Here is the truth on how I managed to pull off this feat. I got my A in my writing class, which is typically one of the easier law classes. I had already taken this exact class my 1L year, getting a B+ the semester I wrote my memo and a B the next semester when I wrote my appellate brief. The only reason why I had to retake it was because I was lacking credits for 1L writing when I transferred. Except for the one other transfer student, everyone in my class was a foreign student there for their LLM. Out of those students, only 3 were native English speakers. I also happen to be really really good looking at writing (hence why you're here reading my blog). Basically, the stars aligned in my favor.

That didn't mean that my A was given to me. Oh hell no. 




I worked just as hard and stressed just as much as I did the first time I had to write these papers. The only difference was that I was already starting out being pretty good so I took this opportunity to find where I could improve and work on that. If you've written a memo or brief already, then you know that they both really suck and take up so much time and energy and it wasn't any different doing it again. If anything, it was a little more challenging this time around because I didn't have a full semester for each paper to research, draft, and revise.

The best part of getting an A in this class was that my GPA started over as a transfer and this was my first grade posted, so for a glorious few days I went around obnoxiously bragging to my parents that I had a 4.0 in law school. Literally, I tried convincing them that I was a genius lol. It was the best of times. But eventually the rest of my typically average grades came in and lowered that GPA because this is law school and it's here to crush your self esteem. 

The truth is that thanks to the curve, A's in law school are rare. Even students who make the top grade in your class probably only got like 70-80% of the questions right on the final. Law school finals are just set up to be that way. I don't mean to be bursting people's bubbles, but I feel like it's my duty to warn y'all about unrealistic expectations. If you have a 2.5 in law school then you're doing just fine.




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