Let’s be totally honest. Competitive-entry courses are never going to be easy, and if you’re serious about getting into second year, you’re going to have to work. This is especially true for LAWS101, where the success rate for second year entry is low.

Law is one of those subjects that has as much content to learn as it does skills. The most successful students will be required to have learnt not just the content (i.e. facts and figures), but also the skills that are assessed in the exams. The exams require the right fusion of preparation, memory, and mental dexterity.

While it is certainly possible to remember all the necessary facts and information in the weeks and months leading up to the exams, doing this leaves you little time to synthesise the information, and provide the comprehensive, well-reasoned arguments which the exams require.

First-year Law exams will not ask you to remember the date of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi or what the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act says. They will demand that you create arguments connecting various legally relevant historical events, and to explain how a case is likely to be decided, based on the information that you have in front of you combined with what you have committed to memory in advance. You will be expected to do this while under immense time pressure, and with the stress of the competition. This is no easy feat, especially when most student spend months struggling to learn only the facts.

The truth is that you need a lot more than simply memory to get through first-year Law successfully. You need prepare early, and then move on to considering what you have learned at a deeper level and creating a comprehensive synthesis, which will be what sets you up for success in the exams. If you want to do this effectively, you need time.

What this all means is that the best way to set yourself up for exam success is to start early. Successful students will need to commit to learning the content comprehensively yet very quickly. This is much easier to do if you have some familiarity with it beforehand. That is why Momentum provides an intensive Summer Programme, where the entire First Semester’s course is taught before uni even starts.

Students who are accepted into the course will have the advantage of knowing the semester’s content in advance and being prepared when it comes to assignments and tests. This means that they’ll already have a good grasp of difficult concepts, and can start developing critical skills, months before everyone else.

At the end of 2022, every Law student will be wishing that they had an extra week or two before the exams — just to get their heads around the tough concepts and content. What they won’t know is that a few students will have actually got just that, by starting early.

Applications are still being accepted for Momentum’s Summer Course.

Students who would like to take a closer look into how Momentum Tutoring helps, can attend our free event here on Tuesday 22 February.