Unprepared Exam Taker: Law School Style...

If you're an unprepared law school exam taker, then something funny happens to you around finals time - you start to appear homeless. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. One day you realize that you've been wearing the same clothes for the past 4 days and haven't showered in 3. If you're a guy, your once clean shaven face is now the proud owner of a beard, and with no classes to attend, you lose all conceptions of time. It may be a Wednesday morning or a Sunday night, you have no idea -- all you know is that you have a semesters worth of studying to do in 3 days.

If you're an unprepared exam taker, it's probably the result of laziness. Sadly, laziness doesn't go away during finals, and if anything, it only becomes worse. During finals time, an unprepared exam taker will find himself embedded in all sorts of new hobbies and interests he didn't even know he had. Before finals you hated animals, but during finals, you can't help but browse the web perusing websites about the nursing habits of baby goats. You become a facebook fiend, poking your friends like an epileptic with a sword. You take up new musical interests. You take in an orphan, build a harp from scratch, and catch up on some old episodes of Fresh Prince. Me and g.nugget spent a lot of time playing stupid video games online. Didn't start till finals came, and never played again once finals ended. Funny how that works...

If you're an unprepared exam taker, then the following has happened to you. You walk into an exam with 4 outlines, tabbed with all the colors of the rainbow. 1 outline is from a gunner in the class above of you that you obtained by.. well, lets just say you're now in possession of it; 2 of your outlines are ones you found online at some website where some loser posts all his outlines and grades and papers for you to gank; the last outline is one you made yourself. Well, you didn't really make it, you just sorta copied and pasted shit from those other outlines and occasionally added some original content from your notes Well, they're not really your notes -- their your friends notes that you had to copy because you were skipping that day.

So you walk into the exam with a cache of outlines, but the funny thing is that you don't really know any of the material. At best, all you remember is a bunch of random crap you tried to cram in the last 24 hours. In the most likely scenario, all you know is where to find the info you need on your outlines. In a way, its kind of like going on a road trip - you don't really need to know how to get from NYC to Cali off the top off your head when you have a trusty map in the glove compartment.

So there you are in the middle of an exam, rustling through your notes, your book, and a bunch of outlines trying to find what you need. You look to your right and see a gunner writing intently and passionately, and all he has by his side is a short mini outline he probably wrote himself. While he seemingly has the answer flowing freely from his brain onto the bluebook, you're wasting valuable writing time by flipping through all your papers, all the while thinking "Damn, I know I just read about this issue on one of my outlines... but what outline was it?? Why isn't there a tab for it? Did I read it in my notes?" Then you go through your notes and are like "Damn, I sure doodled a lot". In the midst of all this hullabaloo, you're throwing papers around left and right, making markings, crossing stuff out, checking tabs, and you probably look like some crazy mad scientist trying to find a hidden variable in a mysterious equation. After 4 minutes of this, you forget what the damn question was in the first place and what you're looking for. So you try and read the question once more only to discover that in the disaster zone that would otherwise be known as your "desk", you can't find the exam! If you're an unprepared exam taker, this has undoubtedly happened to you many times. It just happened to me the other day.

An unprepared exam taker always is writing until time is called. Since he doesn't know what exactly to say, he just says it all. Taking an Evidence exam? Why not throw in some shit about murder in the first degree. If you know it, why not write it! Hey, why not just make stuff up while you're at it. Promissory Negligence? Sure, why not! Cardozo bright line gunner sba theory -- what's that? Who cares! If it pops into your head, write it. Because if you knew your shit to begin with, you'd probably be out of there with an hour to spare.

An unprepared exam taker loves talking with his fellow slackers after the exam about all the b.s they just wrote. "Dude, I was writing all this shit about how the law was egregious, and how the treatment of the plaintiff shocked the conscience. I even threw in the word "estoppel"! I'm a 3L and I still don't even know what it means, but I'll be damned if I didn't put that in there." An unprepared exam taker will always take a few seconds in the exam to laugh at some of the b.s he's writing.

Lastly, if you're a unprepared exam taker, you spend more time figuring out how many pages you haven't read during the semester than you actually spend reading the assignments. If you're an unprepared exam taker, you only go into the exam knowing one thing -- your exam number (and you probably had to go to the office to get it since you most likely lost the piece of paper it originaly came on).

Anyone out there have some memorable B.S they've spouted on an exam? Or any other profiles of unprepared exam takers?