My law exam was strange. I arrived about 15 minutes before the exam started and got shouted at for being late for the announcements! It was just like being back at school. I didn’t get to speak to anyone in my class before the exam. Probably just as well. The guy sitting in front of me had spent weeks trying to learn off 200 cases. He got his wife to ask him about these every night at dinner. I’m not sure I would have wanted to know this before the exam started – bad enough to find out about it at the end.

The paper was split into two sections – contract and tort. The contract paper wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be but the tort paper was harder. Both of these are very large sections of law and none of my favourite torts came up in the exam. The paper only had questions on about 25% of the tort course so I assume this happened to lots of people. This is the first time that I didn’t answer any of the essay questions. Unfortunately they were rather dull and I find really hard to write essays under exam conditions unless they give me something to rant about. Instead I answered four structured problem questions. My tutor recommended that we avoid the essays as it’s easy to misunderstand the question. But I think it would be just as easy to mess up a problem question in the same way.

I’m really looking forward to a time when exams can be typed instead of written. I find it really hard to write for 3 hours. My hand goes into cramp and my already bad handwriting gets much worse.

The results aren’t out until around Christmas Eve – lucky me. Hopefully I’ll do O.K. and will discover that really the exam isn’t all about memory. Talking to various people after the exam I was concerned that they had spent too much time trying to remember cases and statutes and not enough time trying to work out what the questions were really about.