bar: demoralization

Nothing will help your mood about your prospects for passing the bar quite like getting a failed essay back. Unless it's two.

Oh, wait, and unless the reason you failed was for missing issues. And there were comments scrawled across the page like, "What about Equal Protection?" And "Use Case Blah in your policy analysis."

And, of course, the kicker is that I DID the equal protection analysis. On the next page after the scrawling red comment, the second and third words were "Equal" and "Protection." I had also used Case Blah in my policy analysis. It just wasn't on the page where the grader decided to look for it.

The combination of the 2 minutes per essay grading and my "I never think of things like other people" approach is not looking good, my friends.

I'm not sure studying more will help, either. The more I know about a subject, the more likely I am to stray from the standard approach.

In other good news, my grades for last semester are all in. It's official -- I'm a MUCH better student when I don't study too hard or try to learn the material. If only I had known it earlier in law school. This time around, my grades are perfectly indirectly related to my knowledge of the actual subject matter.

Thankfully, I am actually amused (and not angry) that one of my worst grades in law school is in Intellectual Property. And, of course, one of the best is in Corporations, where I didn't buy the book, missed the most classes of any class I took in law school, and had no pre-existing knowledge to fall back on.

I'm thinking the take home message should be that I should stop studying for the bar right now.