Oog. Have you ever had that dream where you’re going to a final exam and you haven’t studied? Have you ever had that dream even after you studied? That’s sure what today felt like.
Actually, things weren’t too bad for the first half of the day. I wrote too slow for the MPT (Multistate Performance Test) and got to:
Remedy: Punitive Damages
— Legal reason: A
And that was it—they called time. I managed to get most of what I wanted in there, but my hand doesn’t move as fast as I’d like it to. When I’m writing, you pervert….
So they took those packets away and handed out the next two essay questions for that morning. That’s when I started to fake it. Okay, maybe I started faking it three years ago when I started law school, but I really started to fake it while writing those essays.
Truth be told, they weren’t all that bad. I managed to squirm my way through—I knew some of the stuff that each question involved and made up some cool stories about the rest. Dunno if they were the stories that the exam readers will be looking for or whether they’ll be entertained by the end result, but I got through it relatively unscathed. I even felt relatively decent when I got outside to eat lunch in a little park in the sunshine with a group of people from school. Then we got back to the testing room and the good feelings went away.
The first question? Ethics and Professional Responsibility. If you want to know how surprising that was to people, consider: they have two bar exams per year, July and February, and there are six essays plus the MPT each time. I took a review course that calculated what all the questions have been in the last ten years. That’s 140 essays and they said it’s been tested 28.57% of the time—approximately once every two years. Note that there’s also an MPRE (Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam) that all law students have to take as well. You’d think they wouldn’t bother going back over the same old subjects, right? Ha ha ha! You fool!
Still, I remembered some things about the subject, no thanks to my professor. During the course of that class, I took a total of twelve pages of notes. That includes multiple lines to mark each date, two pages listing off things we might be tested on for the final exam and this:
[Lawyer can’t conceal physical evidence to make himself a party to the crime. Damn….]
“Hello?”
“Hey, I’m James Randall. You’re the public defender, right?”
“Ye-esssss… why?”
“Open the door, I need some help.”
“What the hell is that?!”
“It’s some evidence I need you to stash for a little while.”
“It’s a dead body!”
“Yeah, well, the trunk of my car was starting to smell.”
“Get that thing out of here!”
“But what about my attorney-client privilege?”
“Shit. All right, stick it under the rug—I’ll have the janitor clean it up tonight. God, I wish people would stop leaving this crap in my office! I’ve been telling my wife for the last three weeks that the smell on my hands is because I had sushi for lunch.”
“Sushi? It might be better to tell her it’s from dead bodies.”
“Tell me about it.”
Needless to say, I wasn’t overly impressed with the content of the class or the professor’s ability to teach it. Still, I managed to get through Problem 4 without too many difficulties. And then everything went to hell. I started bullshitting more than I would if I ever got pulled over by the cops without any pants on. Will they buy any of it? Depends on whether they’re paid to buy it or not.
I’ll give myself credit for one thing: I did a better job of describing legal concepts than in the past. During that review course, we got to write a couple sample essays and I kept writing down things like “hearsay” without providing any explanation. See? You’ve got a puzzled look on your face! You could grade these essays! But this time I remembered to write that it’s “an out-of-court statement used to prove the truth of the matter asserted.” See? You’ve still got a puzzled look on your face! I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or not….
But to help me remember to explain stuff, I kept repeating this to myself: “The graders are retards. The graders are retards. The graders are retards.” Well, not out loud, of course—you never know how many retards could make it through law school these days. But thinking that the people reading the essays were complete imbeciles helped me remember to include a few extra explanations that should help rack up an extra point or two. And after this afternoon, I’ll take every extra point or two I can get.
So now I get to wake up approximately 12 hours from now and get ready for the multiple guess portion of the exam. Yes, that’s right, multiple guess—I don’t think I’ll resort to my brother Justin’s classic “ABACADABA” method, but my score might turn out higher if I did, I dunno. What I do know is that I had a nice dinner just now, I’m going to go spend a long time in the whirlpool downstairs, and then spend several hours reading through study manuals for no good reason whatsoever.
“Whaddya mean, whirlpool?! When did your parents install one of those in the basement? Where is there room in the basement? You don’t sleep in that thing, do you?” Unfortunately, no. That’d be pretty comfy. Until I drown. Then it wouldn’t be so comfy anymore. But no, I spent last night and I’ll spend tonight at the Holiday Inn RiverCentre. I won’t have to deal with driving 20 miles into the city through rush hour traffic, heading over the river where people are so scared of crashing into the water that they slow down to the point where I could run ahead and get to downtown St. Paul before anyone else. And then there’s parking. Oh God, parking. I just hope the hotel lets me stay in the parking lot ‘til later than noon—I’d prefer to leave it here until the exam is over rather than move it first thing in the morning.
The point is that this is a hell of a lot easier than trying to commute from home and I’m a lot less likely to show up to the exam site late. Which is rather important, seeing as how they don’t give you extra time if you show up after they get started. (If today was any indication, I’ll need all the time I can get.)
Okay, time to wrap this up and call it a night. An evening. Time to turn off the laptop and fall asleep in the whirlpool downstairs. For those people who might be mourning me after I drown, remember this: the first essay after the MPT was about wills—if I was still alive, I could help explain what you should do with my stuff. If I’d written a will, that is. Shit. Nyaarrrgh!!! Okay, legal thoughts gone. Shawn leave and swim now. Buh-bye.
