The Penultimate Step: Why the Weeks Before the Exam are Not the Time to Learn New Law

Exams are three or four weeks away. You've done the hard yards. You've worked through your notes, grappled with the tricky cases, attempted past papers, and argued with yourself about whether Factortame really means what your tutor said it means. Well done.

Now comes the step that most students get wrong. Not the final one - walking into the exam hall - but the penultimate one. The stretch between now and exam day.

Here is the mistake I see every single year: students use these last weeks to keep learning. They find a new journal article. They discover a 2024 Supreme Court case they hadn't noticed. They panic-read a whole new chapter on a topic they skipped last term. They treat the penultimate step like the first.

It isn't. The penultimate step is not about input. It is about compression.

Here are a few pieces of advice based on my experience:

1. Stop Adding. Start Compressing.

By now, your notes are probably enormous. Pages of them. Perhaps a beautiful digital file with hyperlinks. It doesn't matter. What matters is that it's too big to fit inside your head at 10am on exam day.

Your job, in these last weeks, is to take those sprawling notes and squeeze them. Twenty pages on judicial review should become five. Five should become one. One should become the back of an index card. And eventually — this is the goal — the whole topic should live in a single sentence or a single diagram that you can reconstruct from memory.

If you cannot compress a topic, you do not understand it. Compression is the proof of comprehension.

2. The "One Page, One Topic" Test

Try this exercise. Pick a topic. Close your books. Take one sheet of A4. Now write everything you would need to answer any exam question on that topic — the governing principle, the leading cases, the academic debate, the counter-argument, the doctrinal tensions.

If you fill the page and still have more to say, you are still in the learning phase, not the compressing phase. Go back to your notes, find what is truly load-bearing, and discard the rest.

3. Rehearse the Opening, Not the Essay

Here is something counterintuitive. In these last weeks, do not keep writing full exam answers. You have done that already. Instead, practice writing the first paragraph of twenty different answers.

Why? Because the opening paragraph is where First-Class answers distinguish themselves. The beginning is half of everything (yes, I like quoting Plato, I am Greek). It is where you identify the legal issue, signal your argument, and show the examiner that you are in control of the question rather than being dragged around by it. If the opening is confident, the rest tends to follow. If the opening is mushy, the rest tends to drown.

Twenty openings, each twenty minutes. That is a better use of your time than four full essays.

4. Protect Yourself

This last one is not about law. It is about you.

The penultimate step is where sleep gets sacrificed, meals get skipped, and anxiety starts running the show. Resist this. The student who walks into the exam hall well-rested with 85% of the syllabus beats the student who walks in exhausted with 95% every time. Your brain is the tool you're bringing to the exam. Don't blunt it the week before the exam.

Go for walks. Eat proper meals. Sleep eight hours. Log off. This is not slacking - it is strategy.

Your Mission for the Coming Weeks

Do not learn new law unless there is a gaping hole you simply must fill. Instead: compress, rehearse openings, and protect yourself. By the time you sit down at the exam desk, your goal is not to know more than the person next to you. It is to retrieve what you already know more cleanly, more quickly, and more confidently.

The penultimate step is quiet. It is unglamorous. It does not feel productive in the way that highlighting a textbook feels productive. But it is where First-Class marks are actually secured.

Best of luck with the final stretch.

P.S.

For more advice on how to excel as a law student and how to write first-class law essays, you can grab a copy of my book here.