How to self-assess after your first semester of law school

Matt received his JD from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2018 and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 2019. He finished in the top 8% of his graduating year, was a Dean’s Fellow, and offers tutoring services for Canadian law school students. You can find more about him here!

For many, the first semester of law school is a stressful and uncertain time, so the lull before the second semester is an opportune moment to engage in self-assessment and reflection. The purpose of this is to provide yourself with the means to continue improving your skills by setting goals for the coming semester. This is important because taking a sober look and seriously assessing your performance is a key to understanding how to improve going forward. Here are three ways to do so: 

Assess your study habits: 

Continuing to work to optimize your study habits will be key in the second semester. To do this, you’ll want to consider whether you felt your study habits during the first semester directly led to being able to apply your understanding of the law during the exam.

One way to do this is to consider each component of your study routine and classify it as “high impact” or “low impact” time with respect to how each component prepared you for your exams. You’ll likely find that passive reading and note taking took up significant amounts of time but had a low impact on your preparedness for the exams, so you’ll want to recalibrate your study approach so that you are investing your time in ways that will give you a high return in terms of building your ability to succeed on your exams.

Finally, you’ll also want to consider whether the time you spent was sustainable for your mental and physical health — it is important to prioritize this as well. 

Assess your understanding: 

You are now able to better assess your understanding of course material after you’ve been through one exam season because you’ll be able to gauge whether you were able to successfully apply your understanding to your exams. If you had gaps in your understanding, it likely became obvious to you on your exams.

Consider all your exams and think about what gaps in understanding were exposed for you — this will help you make the connection between your study strategies and these learning gaps. You’ll then be able to modify your study strategies accordingly.

Assess your exam technique: 

Writing law school exams for the first time is stressful, but the good news is that you are now able to apply that experience to future exams. It’s typically best to evaluate your exam performance in terms of objective markers at this point — consider whether you had gaps in your understanding that tripped you up on questions, whether you were able to complete each question on the exam within the recommended time limit, and if you were able to structure your answers well. This all takes practice and analyzing any issues with your performance is likely to put you in a better and more competitive position for your next set of exams.

The point is not to feel bad about your performance — instead, the goal is to embrace a mindset that prioritizes your growth, and evaluating your exams is a crucial part of this. You should also ask for your completed exam file as well as take the opportunity to meet with your professor when the results are released to provide you with further information to assess yourself on.