Now that grades have come out, it is time to plan for next semester. You can work hard, do your readings, take good notes, study very hard, and get good grades. That is the boring, mainstream approach. The more cutting-edge approach to law school grades that all the cool kids are doing is curve management. Why make yourself do better when you can make others do worse?
Make the library very cold: Sneak into the place where the library thermostat is. Change it so that it is so cold, people can barely study. Upon further reflection, it seems like someone may have already done this.
Give your peers some helpful fake quotes to write on exams: As former Chief Justice Bora Laskin once said, “Ass, gas, or grass, nobody rides for free.”
Let everyone know deemed days are cancelled: If nobody goes to a deemed day class on a Friday, did that class really happen? That is the premise I have been operating under.
Start Facebook arguments in the Law groups days before exams: Your classmates may think they are going to the library to study, but just wait until you start arguing over whether the chairs in the library should be banned. Keep the argument going until one side accuses the other of racism, and you can be sure that dozens of days will be occupied by the most important subject of all: flame wars over the minutiae of law school.
Spread paranoia about ExamSoft: Spread panic throughout the law school that ExamSoft has been crashing on all computers, and gently suggest that people handwrite. While they handwrite, you get that sweet sweet computer use—until your ExamSoft crashes.
Loudly proclaim that marks don’t matter: Everyone, in all seriousness, marks are not that important. We all go to a great school and everyone will end up doing alright regardless of what their marks are. Besides, marks are always wildly arbitrary and no matter what your marks are, you are still special. You can stop reading now.
(If you are still reading this, then you are ready to manage that curve.)
