Because of the way the term works at Bucerius, this week most of the international students had final exams. I had one for intellectual property on Wednesday and one on torts today.
They were not quite what I expected. Potentially easier, vastly easier, which in their own way made them harder. I mean, on a hard test I should have been able to have kicked ass on intellectual property. With the exception of trademarks, which is new for me, I knew all the patent and copyright stuff - including actual statutes, policy goals, and normative arguments pros and cons. I was even holding review sessions before the exam, and there wasn't a single question I couldn't give a good answer to. And yet I still might get a B on the damn thing, just because one of the few bits of information the test asked for wasn't in my notes (I seem to have been missing a trademark slide, which I gather contained the specific answer to the question), and perhaps also because I knew too much. It was hard to parse through all the law in my head and only write down the bits that had been gone over in this class. I kept bringing in more knowledge, and it left me confused because it didn't play so well with the superficiality of the new stuff.
I'm less worried about today's tort exam, but that's because I feel very satisfied with my essays. I don't know if the professor's gonna like them, but he should... In fact, I think they would have made suitable blog posts (and if I ever get them back I may very well post them). It was funny, even, because when I was studying for the test I had been thinking about writing a blog essay on the very subject I got asked. So that was convenient... But the whole thing was still weird: both essays I wrote were normative, and none of the questions (even the ones I didn't need to answer) actually asked about the nuance of the various tort systems we learned about. Perhaps at some point I'll blog about them, just so that knowledge doesn't go to waste...
Anyway, it's stupid things like this that remind me that law school grades are the stupidest basis to judge a person. How can people keep believing that they are in any way precise measures of anything about a person worth measuring?