When you first come to law school, there is very little you can know with any amount of certainty. Perhaps the most useful advice any of us got during the application cycle was “don’t go.” Of course, advice to possibly the most argumentative and stubborn genre of students tends to fall on deaf ears. 1L is notorious for being the year meant to break students down and beat the undergraduate education structure out of them, so students are prepared to think like lawyers rather than like students trying to please a professor for an A. Midterms are the first assessment of how well this is working, and having just completed their first official law school exam, many 1Ls have already entered crisis mode. The second-best advice any of us have ever gotten is “midterms do not matter” — but what did I say about law students taking the advice we are given?

The pressure of midterms (the first law school exam for a 1L at GW) is reasonable in the sense that they should be taken seriously, so students can understand what study methods do or do not work for them. However, despite all the talk in Torts and Contracts about reasonableness, we somehow become the most unreasonable when it comes to midterms. Professors and upperclassmen do what they can to assure us that these exams are not as important as we think they are, but it is understandable why many students refuse to take their word for it.

The law is a subject unlike anything we have studied before, and the purpose of law school is to teach students how to “think like a lawyer.” Issue spotting — the primary application on law school exams — is intended to help students see how certain fact patterns play into various rules and decisions. 1L exams are often open book because students are not being tested on the information but rather its application. No lawyers worth their salt are banking on their memorization of a case from Constitutional Law; they are researching everything no matter how obvious to double- and triple-check that they have everything correct.

Midterms are intended to be as low-stakes as possible. They are only worth fifteen percent of our grade for a reason: it is enough to make us care, but not enough to change our grade. In fact, my Civil Procedure professor told us that almost nobody’s semester grade was changed by their midterm grade, and it was only extreme score outliers who were affected — and this effect was less than a full letter. The goal is to make sure that we know how to issue spot before the final, so we have the skills needed when it actually matters. Doing poorly on a midterm is not an indication that you are a failure of a law student but that some way you are studying or issue-spotting is not as effective as it can be.

Of course, grades are not solely dictated by personal performance but organized in a way where it matters more how the entire class did. You made it to law school, so you are obviously intelligent. The curve forces students into a hierarchy that may otherwise not exist, a means of ranking the best and brightest. Unfortunately, this only adds to the pressure, and now the most challenging experience of our lives is also a competition. You could get 98 percent of the available points on an exam, but if the rest of the class gets 99 of those points, the curve would put your grade far below theirs. This looming threat of others’ success being your personal detriment can be a lot for students to handle, so much so that they may resort to unsavory means of getting ahead.

Nowhere is this concept more apparent than when students discuss how well they think they did with one another. A 1L from the Marshall Inn of Court told me they felt they were in the bottom 30–50% percent of the curve but felt “very ready” when taking the exam. They told me this discrepancy was the result of “managing expectations.” While they felt they had a solid grasp of the material, they said, “I’m sure there are people who did much better than me just in terms of answering the question (and not in terms of understanding the content).” The general consensus in 1L tends to be that the unfamiliarity of the curve is the most overwhelming part of the exam process. So many law students see their grades as a reflection of their personal intelligence rather than as a more objective determination of whether their response properly addressed certain issues of the case (especially when these issues were things about which the student knew or had outlined), but it is far more effective for personal growth to look at midterms in terms of the quality of the answer rather than a criticism of personal knowledge. 

Another 1L from Brandeis Inn also felt they performed in around the same part of the curve as the Marshall student but, after receiving their score, realized they performed far better than they believed they had. Their main concern came with comparing perceived performance with other students after leaving the exam room. They noted, “I felt I had a good idea of how to attack the question and where to earn points by being thorough,” but “when my Inn came out of the exam room, we were talking, and it seemed like many other people felt the same way I did.” They told me that the practice problem provided by their professor was very similar to the actual exam question — which I personally also experienced — leaving little room for discrepancy from one student’s response to the other.  This competition can make things more challenging, as professors must pick unique aspects (e.g., very niche issues, longer questions that are more difficult to complete within the hour) to separate the curve. For example, a Jackson Inn 1L told me their professor let them know the exam question would be challenging to complete within the hour. While the purpose of this kind of question is to ensure that the highest performers will be identified, it only creates this feeling of impossibility surrounding the exam and, subsequently, law school as a whole.

At a certain point, one begins to wonder whether one is spending one’s time studying for oneself, or just to feel on-pace with one’s peers. Even worse, sometimes we feel the need to “show” more of our exam preparation than what actually takes place. It can be intimidating, though, to hear how much others are studying, and it absolutely feels like you are falling behind when everyone else seems to be spending every waking second in the library drafting and redrafting their outlines while you play New York Times games.

A 1L from Cardozo Inn admonished the overpreppers, commenting that “everyone studied too hard, probably making the curve unnecessarily difficult and raising expectations for the final.” They noticed that the same students who had spent so much time on the midterm were many of the same ones with the highest anxiety for the exam. They saw the cost-benefit analysis as unusually skewed against overstudying, especially considering the spectrum of grades across the section only went from a B- to an A (the professor had allegedly informed the section that no one received an A+ to prevent “complacency,” according to the student). “I got the impression that everyone thought this is just how law students live,” they said, “even though it seemed pretty clear we could never scale this for finals. . . I had the same fear everyone else did, that if everyone else was studying this hard, then I had to at least keep up or the curve would run away from me.”

When our success as students is directly associated with the performance of others, it can be easy to harbor contempt for those who put in more effort than us. We take it personally, as if they are intentionally studying for the sole purpose of pushing us further down the ranks. Especially in a year where job searches seem to be earlier than ever before, it feels all the more threatening when others seem to be just as or more competent than us. This pressure continues to mount as we approach finals, and with that pressure can come increasing hostility toward our peers. It becomes easier to see every innocent act as a direct aggression against our personal success, which is, frankly, ridiculous.

We forget that our “competitors” right now will be our colleagues when we all pass the bar in a few years — and yes, we will probably ALL pass. What is important to remember at this point is that, while being competitive can be helpful in the very short term, the collaborations you partake in during law school will be the most important networking connections you can get. Sure, maybe sabotaging another study group will get your GPA a few hundredths of a point higher than someone else’s come graduation, but burning those bridges to get ahead will only leave you further behind. When you walk into the exam room, leave your ego at the door. Professors are not lying to you when they tell you this exam is ultimately unimportant. Upperclassmen are not in on some widespread joke when they tell you that they wish they had listened when they were in their 1L year. If I may, I would like to pose some new advice that I hope you all take: do your best, and get over yourself.