Self-Evaluation Feedback: You should evaluate every single writing practice
assignment you do. This is critical because on exam day, YOU are the only person in
the room who can decide whether the writing you’re doing is up to snuff!
At a minimum, you should ask yourself these questions for each practice writing
assignment you complete:
1. If the practice test had a recommended allotted time, did you finish the
question in the time allowed? If not, what slowed you down?
2. What worked or didn’t work about your essay execution plan and/or your
pre-writing outline?
3. Did you IRAC (or write in whatever formula was required)?
If you aren’t sure, try highlighting each part of the IRAC with a different
color highlighter (one for the I-R-A-C).
4. Did you break out the issues (and sub-issues) to be easily identified by the
grader (typically using headers)?
5. Are your rule statements correct and complete?
Double-check each element using your outline.
6. Did you correctly distinguish between major and minor issues? Did major
issues get more attention and analysis? Did minor issues get dealt with
quickly and efficiently? Did you call out factual ambiguity and legal ambiguity
where appropriate?
7. Did you raise counterarguments where appropriate?
8. Did you use all of the legally significant facts in the fact pattern?
You can actually check off the facts in the fact pattern to be sure.
9. Is your essay easy to read and professional?
10. What did you learn from this practice that you want to remember?
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As you can see, you can give yourself an incredible amount of feedback even without
a model answer to work from. But, if you have a model answer, you can add in these
additional feedback questions:
1. Did you raise all the issues that the model answer raised?
2. Did you correctly identify the major and minor issues?
3. How was your analysis compared to the model answer? Did the answer make
arguments you didn’t make?
4. If you missed issues, which facts in the fact pattern triggered those issues?
Go through these questions for every practice assignment and they’ll help you
evaluate your progress and identify areas you still need to work on.
Best of luck!
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