The Next Semester

• Author: Barbara Glesner Fines
• Pages: 68-77

68

Chapter Seven: The Next

Semester

It’s a brand new semester. Your grades are in. You are devastated,

exhilarated, relieved, puzzled, or angry… or maybe all of these

feelings and more. How do you continue to improve your

performance in law school each semester? Few students take

advantage of the awesome power of reflection on the past as a

learning tool.

Of course, immediately after a semester’s exams, you are best to

simply try to forget the entire experience. The costs in anxiety,

competition, and lost confidence from post-exam comparisons with

others are rarely worth the gains. However, after the exams are

graded, be sure to continue to learn from the process. Students often

neglect to use this outstanding tool for improving their exam

performance -- a review of their prior semester’s work and exam

performance.

Reviewing your past semester’s learning

Look back over your past semester’s work and inventory your

learning. Don’t automatically assume that your grades tell you what

you’ve learned (they are a clue, but there’s many a person who has

gotten a bad grade on an exam in a subject they learned well and

others who have gotten good grades on subjects they have retained

only long enough to get the grade). Since one of your purposes in law

school is to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for a

successful lifetime of lawyering, stop and reflect on what you have

learned. Consider your past semester’s study approaches in light of

that reflection. Some questions to consider:

 Which subject matter do you feel you have retained the best?

What factors contributed to that retention? Did you study

harder, longer? Were you more interested in the subject

matter? Were the learning materials you used different or

better for that subject? How can you take those learning