Bodie–I think that if you gate-check on a smaller plane, you retrieve at the gate. On a larger plane, though, you normally get the bag at baggage claim. In any event, I asked where I should get the bag and they told me to pick it up at baggage claim.

Fitts–Your very relevant and uber cool Contracts/Bus Orgs prof would NEVER base a hypo on Dharma and Greg. Please.

They did allow us additional time once we were let back into the building, unfortunately I spent the time trying to get blood back into my fingers.

A few semesters later, I took Crim Pro having attended only one class, done no reading and having reviewed the Nutshell for about 4 hours. I was taking the class P/F, so who cares, right? Well, I got a C on the exam, not sure why I didn’t get a P. School says they had no record, so I’m SOL. Moving out of my apartment about 1 year later, I found the completed P/F Request Slip in my desk. D’oh!

I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a securities lawyer.

But I get ahead of myself.

The class was administrative law. Cass Sunstein was the professor. It was one of these multi-hour take homes like Thom describes above, and, like Thom, I took it in the library. Cass had given the exam a strict word limit, and, if I recall corectly, said he would not read beyond a certain point (this may be artistic license/revisionist history, but I was definitely worried about writing too much). So about a quarter of the way through the exam, I ran the word count. It seemed I was in good shape, and I kept going. At about the half way point I ran the count again. Still good–and I had slowed down quite a bit so I was in really good shape.

Now, the glitch. As I remember it, but did not know at the time, the default setting on the word count was that it would count words not for the document as a whole but, instead, from the last time you ran the word count. I discoverd this when I ran the word count a third time and it indicated that I had written fewer words than the last time I ran it! Crap! I figured out the error, unchecked a box, ran the word count properly and discoverd that, with about 30 minutes left in the exam, I had written close to three times the allotted amount!

I scrambled in the last half hour to delete 2/3 of my exam answer without deleting important content or making the exam unreadable. Apparentley, I failed, and I received my lowest grade in law school.

On the other hand, I received my second lowest (but still considerably higher) grade in Cass’ environmental law class the next semester, so perhaps the problem wasn’t technical after all . . . .

I was using a laptop computer for the California Bar exam that had removable disk drives, e.g. one for floppy disks and another for CDs. Studying for the Bar, I generally had the CD drive in so I could listen to music while I studied. Being paranoid about bringing the wrong drive to the bar exam, I switched drives about 4-5 days in advance of the Bar Exam so as to avoid any disasters on exam day. Somehow, in a sleep-deprived stupor the night before I must have switched drives again (forgetting I had done so previously) because it was not until the proctor announced that the exam was starting and it was OK to insert the floppy disk that I noticed the problem!

I scrambled around looking for the other drive in my bag after the exam started (of course, I didn’t bring it) and finally found a proctor in the back of the room (I didn’t want to walk to the front because my sister was taking the exam 2 rows in front of me and I didn’t want to freak her out watching me handle my own disaster!) and got some exam books, borrowed a pen, and started writing. Given how horrendous my handwriting was (and is), I switched back to the laptop on the second days of essays despite potential confusion about having part of the exam on the computer and the other part handwritten. I just hoped that all of my materials would be graded together. They were. I passed.

The horror story from my student years: the night before a major law school final, my laptop collapsed, along with my outline and all class notes (that’s right, no backup). I frantically ran around and found a friend who lent me his laptop for the exam. At the time, I had a Carpal tunnel syndrome and absolutely had to use a large ergonomic keyboard. I brought my friend’s laptop and my large keyboard to the exam room, connected them, and sure enough, the computer didn’t work! It took me about 20 minutes of test time and multiple restartings to figure out that my friend’s computer didn’t actually crash – the problem was that my keyboard was not compatible with his laptop (that’s right, I did not test compatibility beforehand). I then tried to use the laptop’s own keyboard, but had to stop every 10 minutes because my fingers would freeze from the bloody Carpal tunnel syndrome. At the end of the exam, when the proctor told us to save our work on a provided floppy disk, it turned out that my friend’s computer had no floppy drive! The proctor took pity on me and brought me to the registrar, who somehow figured out how to transfer my scribbles from the computer.

That was my lowest grade in law school. Better yet, the class was Corporate Acquisitions — my current specialty. Best of all — the prof was my current husband! We didn’t start dating until much later, alas.