A Futile Attempt to De-Stress the 1Ls ALEX CARMONA (1L)

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They’re coming. In September they were just a haze in the far-off distance, way less important than making sure you weren’t that one loser who doesn’t make any friends in the first month of law school. In October they may have looked a little more real, but it was Halloween, for god’s sake, and you were far too busy picking out your awesome costume to stress about LPs. Now it’s the end of November and the murky threat of exams you’ll have to write sometime in a few months has suddenly snapped into terrifyingly clear focus. In a few short weeks, you’re going to have to take an entire semester’s worth of legal knowledge and figure out how it applies to Mr. Flavelle’s traffic accident, Officer Falconer’s murder suspect or the constitution of Emanuelland (which, wouldn’t you know it, just so happens to have exactly the same constitution as Canada). And if you fuck it up, you may as well pack your bags, because that’s the end of —what? They don’t count? Oh. Then why is everybody stressing?

It’s only natural that many of us 1Ls, having almost no other evaluation to go on now, are going to leap at the chance to finally see some letters. But when asked about the prevailing wisdom of December exams, both upper and faculty had the same thing to say—relax.

“I think its important, even if you feel extremely busy, to try to take care of yourself,” Yasmin Dawood, a constitutional law professor here at U of T, said. “Whether its getting a certain amount of sleep every night, getting some fresh air, going outside, talking to other people. So there are all those healthy habits that are easy to forget about when you’re feeling very stressed out but are also very important to keep up with, even during such a busy time.”

David Pardy, 3L, agreed that studying non-stop is not going to help in the long run.

“Chill out. Be calm, attentive, and well rested. That will help you more than an extra two hours of studying. Go for a run or on the stair-master. Watch a comedy and laugh—its proven to reduce stress! Complain to your friends if shit bothers you—also reduces stress! Sleep!”

Katherine Georgious, 3L, was especially vehement about not taking your December results too seriously.

“Since they’re completely meaningless, this isn’t the time to get burnt out and to start to panic. If 1L is hockey game, your December exams aren’t even the end of the first period. The first period of a game actually counts,” she said.

“Your December exams are just the pre-season. And nobody cares if the Leafs went 4-1 or 1-4 in the pre-season. So if you go 1-4 in your December exams, do like any sports team and calmly re-adjust your strategy; because you’ve got the whole season ahead of you to get better. Likewise, if your December exams go really well, feel proud of yourself; but remember that it doesn’t mean you’ve got the season in the bag. Because the season hasn’t started yet.”

Ben Alarie, Dean of the First-Year program, had similar sentiments—he even backed them up with impressive sounding numbers.

“I think the very most important thing for students to know coming out of December tests is that the results are incredibly noisy,” he explained.

“Even if you really prepare well and believe that your preparation is extremely effective, how well you do depends on how well prepared everyone else is in the same class, because the grading system is entirely based on relative performance. So you should expect that there’s going to be a ton of convergence in the class by April. So suppose you’ve been the most diligent student and you’re extremely talented and a quick learner and a quick study and you master it all and you get a really great set of results on your December tests, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels and assume you’re clearly superior to the rest of your colleagues, because some of them won’t have prepared very much at all. They’ll have treated is at a sort of dry run, a freebie, a “let’s see how I do with no preparation” kind of exercise. Some of those students will go away, reverse engineer how to study for exams and use it as a true learning experience, and then go into the April exams and do extremely well. So there will be convergence to the mean in April, which is why the correlation between December and April exams is .43 and not something higher. If you don’t as well as you’d hoped, don’t get too sad, there’s tons of time to study up and figure out how to improve. If you do really well, don’t feel too proud of yourself. Everyone else is going to work hard and redouble their efforts to do better in April.”

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