Eggs, coffee and a Ziploc bag: Recipe for cert exam success
By SYLVIA ADCOCK, CPN Staff Writer
sylvia.adcock@nc.lawyersweekly.com
I guess I owe it to Ziploc bags and my mom’s cooking.
I had it all planned out. I thought I could start studying for the North Carolina State Bar’s paralegal certification exam exactly one week beforehand and be in fine shape. After all, I’ve been able to keep some of my knowledge from deteriorating at my job here at Lawyers Weekly writing about legal issues. A week? Plenty of time.
But the weekend before the test was jam-packed – a little more than I’d planned. My youngest daughter was turning eight, and we had five little girls at our house for a sleepover. Needless to say, no one – least of all me – slept. By Sunday morning, everyone had cleared out and I was trying to clear my head.
My plan was to take Sunday afternoon and evening and go study. Fill my backpack up with all my textbooks, which thankfully I had highlighted, and be unavailable to anyone for about five hours (that’s my attention span).
Turns out my daughter wanted us to have a special family-members-only birthday dinner after her friends had left. Kind of hard to say no. So we went to her favorite restaurant and I ditched the Sunday study plan.
Monday night. Still plenty of time, right? Except that my husband worked late. Real late. He’s a journalist too, and had gotten involved in a breaking story. By the time I made dinner, got everyone in bed, I was beat.
So it was Tuesday before I got started. I took my textbooks and notebooks to work along with a large stack of index cards and a gallon-size Ziploc bag. On a coffee break, I started going through my notes and texts, copying down everything I thought I’d need to know. That night, my husband was late again, but I stayed up past midnight creating my portable study file.
By Wednesday night, I had what I needed. It had taken hours, but the Ziploc bag was full of large index cards, each separated by subject (“R.E. “for real estate, “fam” for family law, etc.) to drill myself on. I could carry the bag anywhere and pull out a stack of cards to review.
But by Thursday night I was starting to panic. Did I really know this stuff? Was I studying the right things? As a Latin student in high school and college, I know my actus reus from my mens rea – but was the test going to go there? I could feel my brain cells begin to deteriorate. I hadn’t been to a test that lasted three hours in years. Plus I don’t like tests where you have to fill in those little circles. I’m sorry, but I don’t.
It was time to call out the big guns. Mom. My 70-plus-year-old mother lives in Raleigh and she has the energy to get up and fix a mean breakfast. So the night before the test, I spent the night at my parents’ house, with no distractions of laundry or dishes piling up. It was just me and my Ziploc bag and a peaceful sleep.
I was up two hours before the exam with mom serving me scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and toast. And lots of coffee. One last look at the index cards and I was headed to the Meredith College campus in plenty of time for the 8 a.m. exam.
I finished the test in two hours. But some parts were harder than I expected, and despite acing my courses at Meredith’s paralegal program, I wasn’t confident I’d passed. A number of questions I was absolutely sure of. Some I wasn’t.
It was a long eight weeks before I got word. I even began to wish I hadn’t told anyone I was taking it. That way, if I failed no one would know, and I could just try again in the spring.
My advice? Go ahead and take the test the first time it’s offered after you finish school. Your capacity to forget things may be greater than you think. And if your job is in a specialized area, you won’t have daily exposure to some of the things that may appear on the test.
And get a good breakfast.
