The Academic Achievement Program strongly advises that you take several practice exams when preparing for midterms and finals. Exams previously administered by your professor are preferable. This will help you ascertain how your professor drafts his or her exams. The Darling Law Library maintains a number of prior exams given by Chapman University Fowler School of Law professors. Whenever possible, select prior exams for which there is a sample answer on file. This will allow you to check your answer against the sample and evaluate your performance. If there is no sample answer on file, ask your professor if he/she will review and comment on your answer. Do not, however, wait until the reading period to ask your professor to review your answer. There will most likely be a line of students waiting outside your professor’s door, so your professor probably will not be able to invest the time necessary to review your answer at that time. When taking practice exams, note the time limitations stated in the exams and adhere to these limitations when drafting your answers.
In addition to reviewing practice exams with your professor, the Academic Achievement Program also has two professors available to assist students in writing and reviewing practice exams: Professor Sarira Sadeghi, Director of Academic Achievement, located in the Center for Student Engagement on the third floor, and Professor Mario Mainero, Executive Director of Bar Preparation and Academic Achievement, located on the fourth floor. Both of these professors are available to give you practice exams and review them for content and structure.
There are a number of books and websites that students have found helpful when preparing for exams. Many of these books are available in the law library and the Chapman bookstore. Moreover, most of the books can be purchased on the Internet. These books include:
- Examples & Explanations series published by Aspen Publishers
- Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul
- Questions and Answers series published by LexisNexis (multiple choice questions and answers)
- Siegel’s series published by Aspen Publishers (essay and multiple choice questions and answers)
- The Eight Secrets of Top Exam Performance in Law School by Charles H. Whitebread
- The Finz Multistate Method by Steven R. Finz (multiple choice questions and answers)
- Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) This website has a number of practice questions related to first year courses. Note that you may need to get a password from the reference librarian in the law library before you can access the CALI materials.
In addition, please review this article on writing exams that has been written by our own Professor Donald Kochan, and that you may find useful in thinking about how to write good law school exams:
"'Thinking' in a Deweyan Perspective: The Law School Exam as a Case Study for Thinking in Lawyering", 12 Nevada Law Journal 395 (2012)
View the published page to see this section.