Shooting Zombies: Final Exam Lightning Round!!

What's more important, learning the material in a class as comprehensively as possible, or learning the material in a way that best prepares you to take a test at the end of the semester?

Law school exams are tricky, you spend an entire semester reading tons of stuff, hoping you can apply it all on a single 3 hour test. Yet, on some finals, professors think turning the test into a horse race can best judge who the smart kids are.

My Criminal Law exam was basically one question, an extremely long fact pattern that included 15 people, more crimes occurred than in the whole movie Bad Boys 2, and it was written in as confusing a style as possible. For example, everybody had 'fake' names; meaning, all of the character's 'names' were made up words I had never seen before, which made it incredibly annoying just to remember who was who. The question itself read like a three-page excerpt from a James Joyce book, boring, confusing, and pretentious.

You spend countless hours studying throughout the semester, yet the final exam comes down to a 3-hour Grand Theft Auto mini-game, shoot as many people in under a minute as possible! I felt like I was being tested on my speed reading and typing abilities more than anything. It was like the climactic scene in a zombie movie, wildly flailing an ax around me trying to keep the pack of monsters at bay.

But in a way, it doesn't matter, because the grades are all based on a strict curve. In the average class there are let's say 100 students. The top 5% of the class gets an A in the class, meaning 5 out of 100 will get an A. The next 10% get an A-, the next 15% get a B+, the next 20% get a B, the next 15% a B-, the next 10% a C+, the next 20% a C, and 5% get a C- or worse.

So, it doesn't really matter how much I know. It only matters that I know more than the kid sitting next to me, because with the curve everything comes down to relative performance. You are only graded against the other students in your class, and the best test will set the curve. This is what makes law school so competitive, when you sit down to take your final, and you see a girl start to cry a few feet away from you, which if I might point out has happened multiple times this year, you can't help but smile.