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Put an A exam and a B exam side by side, same course, same fact pattern, and the first surprise is how similar they look. Both state the rules correctly. Both spot most of the big issues.
Both reach defensible conclusions. The difference is not knowledge, and it is not writing talent in any literary sense.
It is five specific, mechanical behaviors, visible on the page, each of which can be trained. This page is the teardown: the five behaviors, with the before and after for each.
B exams answer from memory: here is what I know about negligence, deployed. A exams answer from the pattern: every planted fact gets interrogated for the issue it triggers, because professors do not include decoration. If the fact pattern mentions that the contract was for the sale of five hundred chairs, that number and those chairs are load bearing, goods, UCC, statute of frauds.
If it mentions the witness was the plaintiff's neighbor rather than a stranger, reliability of the revocation is in play. The A student's first read is a hunt for why is this detail here, and their issue list is the answer. The full training method for this behavior is issue spotting.
Every exam contains more analyzable material than its time allows, on purpose, because allocation under scarcity is the tested skill. B exams spend equally: every issue gets its paragraph, which means the twenty point issue got a five point treatment and the two point issue got a two point treatment, and the arithmetic never recovers. A exams read the call, estimate where the weight sits, usually where the facts are thickest and the doctrine most contested, and spend accordingly: full analysis on the heavy issues, a single clean sentence on the easy ones.
Battery is met because the blow was intentional and harmful, next. That sentence is not laziness. It is the visible signature of judgment.
Here is the before and after. Facts: a seller promises in writing to hold an offer open until Friday; Wednesday, the buyer hears from her neighbor that the seller sold the goods to someone else; Thursday, the buyer shows up to accept. The B treatment: the offer was revoked when the seller sold the goods, so no contract was formed.
Correct as far as it goes, and it goes one sentence. The A treatment: an offer is revocable any time before acceptance, and the promise to hold it open is unenforceable without consideration, so no option protected the buyer; revocation can be indirect, effective when the offeree receives reliable information of conduct definitely inconsistent with the offer. The sale is definitely inconsistent conduct, so the fight is reliability: the buyer argues secondhand word from a neighbor is rumor, not reliable information, and she was entitled to disregard it; the seller answers that the neighbor had no motive to lie and the information proved accurate, which is the reliability the rule contemplates.
On these facts a court would likely find effective revocation, though the buyer's argument is genuine. Same rule knowledge, four times the points, because the professor wrote a neighbor into the facts precisely to create that fight, and the A exam showed up to it.
The most common B exam sentence is a rule wearing an application costume: the contacts here are sufficient to establish jurisdiction. Sufficient because of what? The A exam version names the fact doing the work: the contacts are sufficient because the manufacturer sold two thousand units into the state through its own distributor, conduct purposefully directed at the forum.
The reliable habit is the word because followed by something from the fact pattern, in every sentence of every application section. Graders can award points only for analysis they can see, and facts are what make analysis visible. The sentence level mechanics are part of the IRAC method.
Exam graders read dozens of answers in batches, quickly, against a points rubric. A exams are built for that reader: an issue header or clear topic sentence for every unit so points are findable, one issue per paragraph, conclusions in one committed sentence, no introductions, no restating the facts back, no conclusion paragraph summarizing the essay. B exams open with two paragraphs of throat clearing, this question raises several interesting issues in the law of contracts, that a rubric cannot pay for.
Nothing in the A behaviors is eloquence; several of the best exam answers you will ever read are stylistically ugly. They are just relentlessly findable.
They do not cite more cases; they cite the same few, as clauses attached to rules. They do not hedge every conclusion into mush, and they do not conclude everything one way to seem decisive; they commit issue by issue. They do not use more doctrine than the facts trigger.
And they are not uniform across professors: a minority of graders genuinely reward breadth over depth, or want policy woven throughout, which is discoverable in advance from their past exams and model answers, and only from those. The discovery process is in how to use practice exams.
Behavior four is trainable this week: take any practice answer you have written and audit every application sentence for a fact after because, then rewrite the failures. Behaviors one and three come from drilling issue spotting and both sides reps against past exams. Behavior two, triage, only develops under real time pressure, which is the argument for starting timed practice exams by week nine.
Behavior five is a formatting decision you simply make. None of the five requires being smarter in December than you were in September, which is the point of the teardown: the A exam is a set of behaviors, and behaviors are learnable. The full season plan that installs them is in how to prepare for finals.
On genuinely close calls, almost never; the rubric pays for the arguments. On clear issues, a wrong conclusion signals a rule problem. Commit either way, in one sentence, and spend the saved words on application.
Clarity matters enormously; elegance not at all. Short sentences, issue headers, one point per paragraph. An answer that reads like a checklist with facts beats an essay that reads like a law review note.
Weight follows points: full depth on the heavy issues, one sentence dismissals on the easy ones, and never zero on anything you spotted. When in doubt, the fact density of the pattern tells you where the professor put the points.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026