Congratulations! You completed another week! I wanted to write a useful blog and was drafting one, but all of a sudden I changed my subject. Here is a personal, not an absolute, tips I learned from trial and error.
1. A perfect assignment submission v. An imperfect assignment submission
Sometimes, an imperfect submission is an answer.
When you are in law school, you will be busy. Very, very busy. Professors will give you readings and other assignments to submit. Check the due date and complete your assignment minimum a few hours before the deadline. I was also in the position that who wanted to submit a perfect, at least a satisfactory, assignment. However, if you don’t think you’re going to complete your assignment to the level you want, I recommend you to stop immediately and fill out the assignment in the form of submission. It may sound strange, but this is much better than the case of failing to submit in time. It may vary among professors, but for those who strictly apply in-time submissions, there may be a risk of zero points and the submission itself may not be possible.
Of course, there may be justified excuses. However, if you don’t have an excuse, each assignment has a due date, and submitting in-time is much better than a late but highly complete submission even if it is not satisfactory.
One tip is that if re-submission is allowed, submit first and re-submit your more complete version later in-time. Either one is better than an overdue, perfect assignment submission.
2. Outlining
First, you all did a great job! I didn’t even know or make an outline even after law school started. Now, some of you might have a question. Is it an outline?
The answer is, in my opinion, yes. There is no rule in Outlining. There are recommendations. They can help you and guide you on how to make an outline. They are very helpful and useful recommendations. However, once you find out your way, personally, recommend you to follow your way. Some might comfortable with 70 pages outline and some might comfortable with 20 pages outline. The page numbers do not decide your success in a law school. Rather, making an outline of and in itself helps you study.
However, to be a useful outline, I think you should be able to extract rules of laws from your outline. If you wrote down only keywords in your outline and you are able to apply that rule of law to given facts, I think it is useful. But, if you feel hard to apply a rule of law which you studied from a case to similar facts, it is a good time to go back and refine your outline.
I think the total reading assignments were, let’s say an average of 700 pages per course. At the end of the semester, you should be ready to apply rules of laws you learned to given facts given in the exams. In the case of multiple-choice questions asking a legal concept, you should clearly understand the asked concept to answer a question with confidence. An outline should be useful in that regard.
Making a useful outline takes time. You have time to practice making an outline based on what you learned. You do not need to have the same one with others. Have yours, but a useful one.
Happy Monday!
– Yangmo (Harvey) Ahn, CLEO PLSI TA