Students, want to learn more in law school? Look back, not just forward. As the semester begins, instead of focusing solely on the new classes you’re taking, review the exams you took last semester. Those exams aren’t just for assigning you a grade; you can also use them as a learning tool.

Read the exam questions and your answers. Look at the professor’s comments on your exam and any model answers the professor has provided. What did you get wrong? What in the course did you misunderstand? If some areas are still unclear to you, make an appointment with the professor and review the exam with him or her.

If you do that, you’ll have a much better understanding of the courses you took than if you let your learning stop at the end of your final moment of exam preparation. Professors constantly reevaluate what we know and whether we’re right; you should too. You don’t want to carry that B grade into your legal career; you want to be an A lawyer. If you review your exams, you emerge from that review process with a better understanding of the subject matter.

You might think you’ll never use that material again, but it’s surprising what you draw on in practice. When I was in law school, back when we were chiseling our exam answers on stone tablets, I took a conflict of laws course just because I thought it was interesting. I didn’t think I would ever use it in practice. To my surprise, two years out of law school, I was faced with a major choice-of-law research question. Don’t assume you can leave those old courses behind when you graduate. And, if it comes up, you want to understand it as well as you possibly can.

Few of my students take advantage of the opportunity to review exams. I have never had more than a handful of students stop by to review their exams or even ask me questions about something on the exam. Some semesters, I see no students at all. I don’t even see students who did badly on my Business Associations exam and are taking more advanced courses from me. You would think those students especially would want to clear up where they went wrong.

I provide model answers, so it’s possible students are reviewing those, but I doubt it. My guess is that most students are thankful to have the past semester’s exams behind them and don’t look back as they breeze on to the next semester’s classes.

If students are interested only in earning the credit required for their eventual graduation, that attitude is understandable. But I hope that most of my students are interested in more than just obtaining a credential required to practice. I hope they’re interested in learning as much as they can to be the best lawyers they can be. If that’s their goal, they ought to be reviewing their exams.