Are you people tired of hearing about exams yet? So am I, at least a little. But I want to finish writing about some things I did to prepare so that it’ll be there for future examinees and googlers. It was helpful for me to rummage around in Clancy’s archives and read what she was thinking when she took hers, and so I’d like to pass it on. If this bores you, feel free to skip these entries — my feelings won’t be hurt.

So anyway, writing sprints. The weekend before I took my first two hour in-house exams, it occurred to me to write a one hour answer to each question, just to see what would come out. I had been working on outlines, but actually writing the answer struck me as a better process for my peculiar mind. It turned out that I was right. It let me see how far I could get without notes while still having the luxury of cracking into various resources when I got stuck. It let me reason my way through argumentative structures and find out really quickly what wouldn't work for me. It blew a lot of false securities out of the water, but it also showed me that I could in fact write a substantive answer really quickly. The writing was raw, but all the meat was pretty much there.

I mentioned all this to Derek, and was delighted to find out today that he ran with it and it seems to have worked well for him. (His prep seems much more fine-tuned than mine was, so I expect him to completely rock anyway.) He also commented on the rawness of the writing, because what else can you really expect when you’re going full-tilt for an hour straight? And it occurred to me that another benefit of doing sprints is that your brain holds onto those clumsy sentences you generate. It percolates them and whirls them, and when you sit down to write the real deal, what comes out is almost a 2.0 draft. At least 1.7 or 1.8, anyway. Much better than zero-level.

Another trick that worked well for a colleague of mine was fake-teaching. He would lock himself in his study for a few hours and pretend to teach the central texts on his list as well as the answers to his questions. He's much more verbal than I am, and it worked out really well for him. He passed the writtens well, and his orals are already a little bit legendary in the department.

The point is this: there will come a time in your prep when pouring over notes and outlines again is just spinning your wheels. You may find it very helpful to find ways to actually do something that gives you some clues about your possible performance and also produces some concrete results that you can work with. Sprints and fake-teaching aren’t the only things you can do, but they’re things that I’ve seen work.