How To Revise For Law Exams

Law courses are well known to be challenging, so it’s important to employ your study skills in time management and communication in order to succeed during exam time. Law students should use every tool at their disposal to ensure that they set themselves up for success.

Whether it’s utilising past papers, writing up notes, or revising lectures, understanding the exam is the key to doing well. Remember that revision doesn’t just start at exam time. If you apply yourself fully to your studies throughout the year, exam time will naturally be less strenuous. Complete these steps to ensure that the preparation you’re doing for your law exams is thorough enough.

1. Look at past exam papers

Speak to your tutor in advance of the exam to find out what types of questions or topics are likely to show up. Although exams may not be internally set, tutors will have some insider track after monitoring exam topics over years gone by. They will also give you some tips as to how to structure your answers so that you know how to focus your revision. 

2. Assess your strengths and weaknesses

If you’re particularly strong in tort but fall down in commercial, for example, it’s obvious where to focus your energy. Look at where you’ve lost marks in the past in order to pick up the shortfall. This will help you to decide where to focus on your revision.

Write down your strength and weaknesses and decide how to focus on your revision. These strengths and weaknesses will help you to plan your revision timetable.

Discover your learning style

As well as assessing your strengths and weaknesses in a general sense, try to discover what type of learner you are to help your revision process go smoothly. Are you one of the lucky ones who can read something once and have it sink in? Are you a visual learner who relies on spider diagrams and coloured pens? Do you need to make notes, and then make notes on your notes?

Find your way of learning to ensure that the information you need to learn stays in your mind. 

3. Create a revision timetable

When you’ve decided on the areas that you’d like to focus on, you can create a revision timetable. A revision timetable will help you to ensure that you can cover all bases and without spreading your efforts too thinly over multiple projects. Remember that if you have more than one exam, you can plan your timetable according to which exam is fist.

A revision timetable can also help you plan breaks for lunch or to simply get away from your desk – and will help you schedule in time for family and friends. Breaks are important to prevent burn out or stress, so do not leave them out of your timetable. Some people find it beneficial to take a break every 30 minutes to break their revision into short bursts.  

4. Make Q&A notecards 

Notecards with definitions, dates, case studies and more can be a really helpful tool for memorisation. Go through them yourself or ask a family member or housemate to read the questions while you shout out the answers.

Write the question on one side, and the answer on the other. This turns memorisation into a game – which can be a useful technique for helping you remember what you need to, if this matches your preferred method of learning.

5. Practice exam technique

Knowing the subject and being able to write all your knowledge down in an exam are two different things. A good way to prepare for an exam is to practice exam technique to ensure that you know how to plan and write an exam question under exam conditions and in the time stated. Practice structuring an answer and think about specific case studies or examples you will be able to use if any particular topic comes up. 

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