Professional Conduct Exam
Hey friends
I decided to write a blog post to discuss the Professional Conduct Exam. I was expecting it to be easy. It wasn’t.
Why did I expect it to be easy?
Okay, it may be a little misleading to say I thought it would be easy - none of the exams would have been easy if I didn’t spend so much time preparing for them. I just thought that I would find the exam easy. After all, I had technically started revising in January 2021 - a whole year before the exam.
Anyone who knows me or follows me will tell you how much I LOVE Synap. Snap is the University of Law’s revision tool for the Wills and the Conduct exam, both of which are multiple choice (MCQ). Synap provides a bank of MCQ questions which are supposed to be in the same style as the MCQs will be in the exam. Synap uses an algorithm to remember what questions you are good at, what questions you aren’t so good at, and uses this data to present you with the questions in a specific order/frequency which helps with spaced repetition learning. I used Synap almost exclusively to revise for Wills and managed to get 90% in the exam - I thought it was my not-so-secret weapon.
I used Synap to revise for Conduct in exactly the same way that I did for Wills. I kept doing the questions over and over again until I was really familiar with the style of questioning and the subject matter. I got to the point where I was getting 100% on all of the practise questions, so naturally I felt confident going into the exam.
What was the exam actually like?
Firstly, the questions were nothing like the Synap questions. They were much harder and much more in depth. The style of questioning was not at all like the Synap questions.
Luckily, I had my Legal Foundations textbook with me which was all tabbed up so I found it relatively easy to find the relevant pages in the book, and luckily I was able to work out the answers to all of the questions. Whether I answered the questions correctly remains to be seen - I will update this blog post as soon as I receive my results!
Exam tips: what I did right and what I could have improved on…
Take your Legal Foundations Textbook and your SRA Code of Conduct into the exam. Make sure you really know your way around the books, or tab them comprehensively. This is something I did well, and it probably saved me!
Re-do the workshop tasks again. This is something I did not do because I though that the Synap tool would be enough but I very much regret not doing the workshop tasks again.
Complete the workbook. I completed the workbook last year and whilst I read through it this year, I didn’t completely re-do it and I probably should have. Again, I placed too much weight on the Synap tool and not enough on the actual workshop tasks.
Practise using Synap. I have just spoken at length about how Synap didn’t fully prepare me for the exam. However, it is still a tool I highly recommend using. MCQ exams are very different to written exams, and although you may be able to recognise a couple of the ‘answers’ which are clearly wrong, many times there will be two ‘answers’ which are extremely similar and which both appear to be correct. You need to get used to answering MCQs just to see all of the potential ways you can be tripped up in the exam, as it will make you more vigilant and critical of how questions are worded. The only way you can get this experience is from using Synap and the Test and Feedback questions, so be sure to incorporate them into your revision strategy.
I hope you found this helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions and connect with me on instagram at @legalmillie
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Camilla :)
