Improve your law quiz and assignment scores

Now that you have taken a few law quizzes, and you received possibly a low score, i.e. 40 -60, you are thinking either the "quizzes are completely unfair", or "that I am really stupid and should never become a paralegal" - actually neither are completely true (just kidding). Actually what is happening is that you are being asked to "kick your skills up a notch". Legal Analysis is actually a very funny "animal" - and very frustrating. You must move from the "concrete" to the "abstract". It is like you were playing baseball, and your batting average was .400 but you were only being "dished up" straight balls, and now the slider, and curve ball, and knuckle ball all are being introduced, and your average now plummets to .150 (sorry if you do not like baseball metaphor).

So take heart. There are a number of things you can do. read the following inforrmation - click here to improve your scores

First make sure you know each word you read. So go to an online dictionary and look up even the simple words you thought you understood. Then make sure you look up all of the legal words. Then read the facts of each case as if it were a story. Diagram with pencil stick figures the main characters and use arrows to show their relationship and what they are doing to each other. This helps you to understand the story. Legal facts can be very confusing a lot of the time. If you do not know the story you will not know the law I can promise you. Then finally follow the 7 steps of Critical Thinking when you read your law mateials. I think that most students are having "real problems" with steps 6 - Synthesis and step 7 - Evaluation, so go down to steps 1-5 and get those down first, and then jump up to 6 and 7. hope this helps a little. Prof. J.