reflections on the exam (part 2)

well, we've got two down, and two to go. i'm going to keep this entry brief, as the civ pro exam is just two days away, and i feel completely physically and intellectully removed from nan, and from everything we did in that class... it seems like we haven't had civ pro in a month!

anyhow, before my reflections on the torts exam, let me say thank you again to those of you who contributed poetry and various funny remarks to the message board after the last exam. maybe after i fail out of school, one of you can take over menlovian for me, and i'll just post random comments on the message boards about the ongoing exploits of the huxtable clan.

yes, i really do think that i will be failing out of BLS in the very near future. unfortunately, the school sent me a bill for next semester, so i guess i have to pay up front, then get a refund after i withdraw.

as i said in the past, i'm pretty sure i got a 'D' or 'F' on the crim exam, and i feel like i got a solid 'F' on torts yesterday.

i went into it all fucked up... i had not slept since noon on sunday, so i had been awake for something like 21 hours as the exam was being handed out, and for a full 24 hours by the end of the exam. what was worse was that i knew that i'd be having trouble falling asleep the night before the exam because of nerves, and i drank four cans of guinness between about 10:00 and midnight on sunday night, hoping to pacify myself enough to fall asleep. unfortunately, all that i accomplished was leaving myself with a bit of a hangover by around 5 a.m., and also creating a potentially explosive situation somewhere towards the tail end of my digestive system (see below).

i felt pretty much like i was on PCP during those three hours of the exam. i was itching like crazy all over my shoulders and arms, i kept having these fleeting hallucinations of gold and silver flashes of light around the periphery of my field of vision, and worst of all, about every ten minutes or so, my guts started clenching up on me, and i was constantly worried that i was going to unleash a monstrous torrent of diarrhea right there into my seat.

(i remember during scott kreppein's review session how he said that we should be on the lookout for large bodies of collected liquids on tony's exams... little did i know that the ultrahazardous liquid would be sloshing around in the lower regions of my bowels...)

so the point is that i was in no condition to take the exam, and i spent 3 hours in a constant state of panic. because of this, i made many, many mistakes on the exam, but there was one mistake that was purely menlovian.

while i was reading the first page, misread the point values of the questions. in my sleepless, delirious and diarrheaic state, i thought that it said that questions 1-3 were worth 10 points each, questions 4-5 were worth 30 points each, and question 6 was worth 20 points. that's right... i thought the exam was out of a possible 110 points.

the point is that i only had ten minutes left in the exam when i got to question 6. you can imagine my horror when i saw how long the fact pattern was, and turned back to the first page to discover my mistake.

obviously, ten minutes were not quite enough time for me to effectively address the numerous issues contained in that problem. the bottom line is that i probably scored 2/30 on question six, and proabably about a 30/110 on the entire exam.

i mean 30/100.

despite the miserable situation, i have to say that it was a fair exam (especially compared to what happened last tuesday in the state of justice), and the questions were interesting. lots of cool stuff seemed to be happening in new bork. i liked it a lot when that kid leaned into traffic and got his head smashed in my that chick rose who was driving carefully down first street. that was pretty much how i felt by the end of the exam, especially when i discovered my mistake on question 6.

i also really liked what was going on between the arnolds and the levins. i wish that the story could have been longer. you just know that somewhere down the line, those two families each had a kid, and that those kids fell in love with each other, but had to keep their relationship a secret, and they'd meet out by the pond when their parents were at Wal-Mart, and they'd kiss and frolic and roll around in the goose shit.

also great was the image of the arnolds shouting religious slurs through a megaphone. that's got to be illegal.

now those of you who have been reading menlovian since the beginning may recall me mentioning how i wasn't learning anything in torts except for how "once upon a time, there was a drunk boy who was vomiting out of the window of a moving car, and who smashed his head on a cement post along the road..." or something along those lines. i went on to say that i would write about that on the exam.

well, i'm proud to say that i did get to include mcguiggan on the exam! you can imagine my excitement when i saw someone drunk at a party in the hypo. it was as if everything had come full circle for me.

the question i truly bombed on was the one where the guy was misdiagnosed for heart surgery. i read through the facts like three times, but i really didn't see what the problem was. i know these exams are all about issue spotting, but really the only issue that i spotted on that one was when the doctor was swabbing iodine onto his chest. i said that it was battery for her to do that. the point is that i really fucked up that question, which is pathetic, especially since i thought it was worth 30 points. basically i went into this long discussion of case law debating whether or not the cotton ball to his chest constituted battery.

in retrospect, i realize that since it was a fairly invasive procedure, the dude was probably anesthetized to the point of unconsciousness... and this pretty much undermines up my whole battery argument.

the bottom line is that i really fucked up. the best part of the exam was when it ended. by that point i was sweating, and my intestines felt like they were going to explode. inspired by question 6, i ran out to the bathroom and let loose with a raging torrent of molten tar which seemingly would not subside for several minutes.

and that's the thought i'd like to leave you all with for this week... four pints of hot, molten, tar-like guinness vomiting out of my ass in a rapid series of staccato bursts, like a shitty round of applause to punctuate the end of a shitty performance on the exam.

i'll talk to you all after the civ pro exam... good luck everyone.