We had the last of our graded midterms this past Monday. After the exam, most everyone hit a local pub to unwind for a little bit. At least around me, one ground rule was established: don't talk about the exam. Talking about how we felt, especially now that it's over, was fine, but I don't think that many (if any) of us wanted to debrief the exam, fact by fact, and compare notes. That's generally true of law school exams. They're complicated beasts, with a number of facts that can be argued in a whole host of ways. It's almost a certainty that someone else will see things I didn't see, and that I saw things that they missed. So discussing the test after the fact can easily lead to even more freak-out stress than you've already put yourself through while preparing. It's just not a good idea.
Here's what I'm willing to say about the test. As time went by, our prof crossed off numbers on the whiteboard to indicate how much time was left. They progressively went down from 30 to 20 to 10 to 5 to 2 to 1, which was soon followed by "that's it." That's pretty standard practice in standardized test settings. Enough other test-givers have done the same thing that I followed suit when I was teaching, letting people know when they had 45, 30, 15, 10, 5, and 2 minutes left. Nothing fancy, just a soft verbal reminder.
In hindsight, I realize that I could have jazzed it up a bit, maybe by putting a screenshot from Mortal Kombat up on the projector as time expired, then exclaiming in a half-serious voice, "Finish them!"
It would have amused me, but its hard to say how many students would have been in the mood for reference humor after focusing on the exam for several hours. So it may have been best that I didn't think of this until now.
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