The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Finally the first day of the test is upon me. I get a 5:30 am wake-up call because I'm convinced I need to study more, and a horrible attendant at the visitor lot the day before freaked me out by saying that they were going to run out of spots on test day. So I tried to be there by 6:30, although it ended up being 7:00, and in reality as long as I had been there before 7:30 I probably would have been ok. Then I studied in the car. I'm sure I learned absolutely nothing, but it made me feel better.

Inside it was a mad house, as over 1000 stressed, confused, and lost people milled around in the hallway. There were almost no signs to direct us. But then they opened the doors, got everyone checked in, and we sat down at our stations. I liked my test location. It was a large, square, inverted wedding-cake tiered room, with a big, square parquet floor at the bottom, ringed on three sides with 3 or 4 levels of tiers. I was on a top tier, facing the door, which I found suited by latent claustrophobia. The tables were also only designed for 2 people, so you were always on the end and didn't have to share a long row (thus reducing the number of people who could shake the table while you were trying to write). Our proctor was also very nice and un-scary, which helped too, and the room, despite the number of people crammed into it, was actually pretty quiet.

Then it was time to begin. Per BarBri's suggestion I did the NY multiple choice questions first (50 in an hour). Despite having done many practice ones in the preceding days I don't think I did well on this. I'm pretty sure I definitely got about 5 right, but when I went to the car at lunch to do some more review, I discovered that I probably had gotten at least 5 definitely wrong as well... On the other hand, BarBri said if we got only 50% we'd be ok, and it was only 10% of the total exam score. So I feel stupid about the ones I missed that I feel I should have gotten, but otherwise I think it's probably not a problem. Especially since I think I did ok the rest of the day. The first essay I did I think flailed around a little bit, but I'm sure I got some points. The other essays seemed to go much better though, what with better IRACing and I felt ok on both my issue spotting and rule announcing. Not perfect, but a hopefully plausible passing attempt. And then there was the MPT, which was almost exactly like the practice one we'd done. I did everything on it that I'd done right before, plus the things that I'd missed, and if all that's not good enough then I don't know what else to do. It's also 10% of the score, and hopefully I did well enough on it to compensate for the iffy multiple choice.