You made it through half of your 1L year, you (hopefully) had some rest and rejuvenation away from law school, and now we have ruined it all by posting your grades right before you had to jump into your second semester. Sorry about that.

Now that you have had a few days to freak out, look at your grades, freak out again, and sleep on it a couple of nights, here are a few thoughts from someone who has seen a lot of students go through this. Most importantly, as I tell my students every fall after they take the exam, law school exams do not indicate how smart you are or how good a lawyer you are going to be. Law school exams evaluate specific skills that you are still very much in the process of learning. If you had me for Contracts, that grade tells you how you did on issue-spotter essays about contracts and Muppets on one day in December. I know that your grade feels incredibly consequential, but it is one piece of very limited information. There is a lot that you can do with that information to change your grades in the future and a lot you can add to that information to get you into the legal career you want.

Maybe you are thrilled with your grades – if so, congratulations! A lot of the rest of what I am going to say still applies to you, but you are probably less stressed about it. Keep that in mind if you are tempted to tell everyone you know about your grade.

What if you are disappointed with your grade? I have four concrete things for you to do in the next couple of weeks. First, if you haven’t already, carve out some time to think about your work last semester and what you may want to change. Students are often surprised by their grades, which makes sense – it is hard to get a lot of practice with full-length issue-spotter essays, and how you feel after a test often isn’t related to how well you did on the test. You may be at loose ends about where things went awry for you, and that’s okay – but try to think through how well your actual studying matched your goals from the start of the semester, how rushed (or not) you felt as December approached, and how prepared you felt walking into the exam. Maybe you had a study group that was less helpful than you had hoped, or you didn’t have a study group and would like one to help keep you on track. Maybe you can point to the part of your outline that you filled in from an outline bank or the past exams you never reviewed – now is the time to identify any study habits that you want to add or subtract from last semester and think about how to build them in.

Second, reach out to your professors about reviewing any exam that you wish you had done better on. The key takeaway from these meetings is not the actual substance of the exam, but identifying study or exam-writing practices that you can tweak this semester. Try to come with some specific questions – did you have a problem with failing to spot issues, or did you misunderstand or mis-state the legal rules? If you have any questions or theories about your study habits, ask them – did you focus too much on the individual facts of cases at the expense of broader principles? Sometimes I can tell that a student had more in their head than they were able to get onto the page, so the issue is more writing and organization than substantive understanding. Once you’ve met with all of the professors that you want to review with, see if there are any commonalities. An issue might jump out at you, like you rush into applying rules without actually stating the rule, or your time management meant you always got the highest score on the first question and the lowest score on the last one. If so, this should directly impact how you study for the spring semester. You may also realize that you perform better on certain types of evaluations – some students get major test anxiety, some people take to multiple choice questions but not essays. Unfortunately you don’t have the option in your first year to act on that information, but tuck it away for course selection for your second and third years – if the pattern continues, you may want to take it into account as you choose classes in the future.

Third, reach out to the office of Career Strategy & Professional Development. Alas, in addition to your classes this semester you get to fully stress about the hunt for a summer job. You will need to talk about your grades to some extent in your resume, cover letters, and interviews. They are the experts about how to do that thoughtfully, as well as all the source of other excellent guidance about your path towards employment.

Fourth, go to your professor’s office hours. Not just once. Go a few times. Hopefully you use the time to increase your knowledge of the course material, but I have more instrumentalist reasons in mind. My best recommendation letters are not necessarily for the students who got the highest grades. They are for the students I know the best. I wrote a letter literally last week that said “This student got a [grade redacted] in Contracts, but I do not believe that grade accurately reflects their understanding of the course.” And then I explained why, which I could do because they came to my office hours throughout the semester, so I knew how much they had worked and that they absolutely had the course materials down pat, even if they weren’t able to translate that into an A exam. I’ve written letters in the past with a longer story, saying this student’s GPA does not reflect their abilities: look how they started off with a not-great GPA, learned from their mistakes, and have gotten higher grades every semester since. I can’t write those letters if I only interact with a student in the classroom, and neither can your professors this semester.

Finally, a little bit of perspective. Your grades seem incredibly important right now because they are the only thing that you have as a data point. They will not seem this way forever. You have probably already heard that once you get your first job out of law school, no one will ever ask about your grades again. That’s correct, but that shift starts earlier than you might think. Employers are looking at your grades right now, but before you know it they will have other grades to look at. They’ll have work experience from this summer. They’ll have writing samples and mock trial and moot court and leadership positions in student organizations. And perhaps most importantly, they’ll have met you at a networking event and have a sense of you as a human being rather than just one set of grades.

You’re also probably being really hard on yourself, for understandable reasons. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a smart student who likely got really good grades in college. And then you come to law school, where we grade on a curve. Keep that in mind if you are feeling disappointed. Several years ago I went over an exam with a student who confessed at the end of our meeting that she was questioning whether she had what it took for law school. I had to point out that although I agreed that she was capable of getting higher than a B, she was basically the exact midpoint of the class. She had done better than half of her classmates. Of course she had what it took (and is a successful attorney today). And so do you. So take a deep breath, scream into a pillow a couple of times, and start looking up your professors’ office hours.