Here are some answers to a range of questions I have received about the final exam recently. Please let me know if you have others I have not addressed.
QUESTION: What will be the format of the exam?
ANSWER: A mixture of multiple-choice questions and one or two essay questions, roughly half of each.
QUESTION: Will the exam be open book?
ANSWER: Yes. All printed material is fair game, other than books checked out of the library. Your outline. Your friend's outline. Commercial outlines. Flash cards. Whatever. (For what it is worth, I do not think such things are very helpful, but that is for you to decide.)
QUESTION: Will you allow us to use our computers for any reason other than to write the exam, such as to access our notes saved in our hard drives.
ANSWER: No. If you want it at the exam, bring a hard copy. My apologies for the environmental degradation. For a more detailed explanation, please see my prior post on the topic here.
QUESTION: Can you provide any indication of what sorts of questions you tend to ask, or what types of answers you prefer.
ANSWER: I think the best indications would be my past exams and my model answers to those exams. All of my past exams, checklists for answers, and some complete model answers are posted on the ClaraNet course page.
QUESTION: Do you have any suggestion as to how to prepare for the multiple choice portion of the exam?
ANSWER: Unfortunately, I am not smart enough or creative enough to devise a set of parallel, "reject" multiple choice questions. But I think that the best indication of what my questions are like will be my past essay questions. The principal reason I use multiple choice questions is to cover more topics than I can possibly reach in a three-hour essay exam. To me, the perfect multiple choice question is a brief, essay-like fact pattern that calls on the student to successfully complete one, discrete step in the legal analysis. Thus, I think of multiple-choice questions as very similar to a short essay question, but where the student must only fill in a circle rather than taking th time to write out the analysis.
Again, if you have additional questions about the exam, please let me know, and I will be happy to answer them.