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Message: <blockquote data-quote="average_jo123" data-source="post: 213174" data-attributes="member: 15838">ULaw will have drummed into your head from day one that academic law is very important and they are right. I don't know the exact percentage but if you do check the spec in detail I'm pretty sure you will find that the academic law modules make up a very substantial chunk. And that was certainly the case for me as far as I can recall during the actual exam. If I had not known stuff from public law, trusts, criminal etc in a lot of detail I would have definitely been cooked. If anyone tells you that if you have already done the GDL or an LLB elsewhere you will be fine, treat that advice with utmost caution — the academic law you need to pass is not simply what you learnt in your GDL or LLB, it's what's in the spec. For example during my LLB we spent ages looking at sexual offences in criminal law and spent basically zero time looking at property offences — sexual offences is nowhere to be seen on the SQE1 spec but the list of property offences you need to know for SQE is very broad. There is also loads of other little details like e.g. capacity to enter into contracts in contract law that neither me nor my classmates who did their LLB at LSE, for example ever even been introduced to when we did our LLB. So it is very important that you look at the spec and check absolutely everything off the list and make sure you have a good understanding of everything instead of relying on any stale knowledge you may or may not have from your GDL or LLB days.For me at least I utilised absolutely nothing from my LLB for SQE prep it was literally as if I had not even done an LLB beforehand lmao my undergrad was truly a waste of money and time. I basically started from a blank slate because e.g. (1) the last time I studied contract law at uni was 5 years ago so I was pretty sure there would have been stuff that's changed and I dare not rely on my stale materials from 5 years ago; and (2) none of my LLB materials were directly relevant to the SQE spec specifically, so it was a waste of time trying to pick out anything from stale materials to try to link them to what I need for the SQE. I started from scratch and relied pretty much exclusively on ULaw's manuals and just checked it against the spec. No harm looking at other providers' textbooks as well if you want to cover all your bases, but you will be short on time so pick your battles accordingly.I do have classmates who have just done the GDL in the last year and to save time for certain things they do just flick back to their GDL notes. I'd say if you have done the GDL very recently this is fair enough — just look out for any law that might have changed since then (the law updaters for your ULaw SQE manuals should state any changes before your examinable law cut off date). But again, you also cannot rely on your GDL materials alone - you must make sure you check it against the SQE FLK spec and the easiest way to make sure you cover all your bases is to make sure you make a good dent in the ULaw SQE academic law manuals. Occasionally I do see one or two of my classmates use random case law or recall random pieces of law from their LLB during the course when we're discussing practice questions - if this is how you remember the law because it was how it was seared into your brain the first time you learnt it - fair enough (just make sure the law hasn't changed since). But again, these random bits and bops from your LLB will not help you pass. You still need to cover all your bases in the spec. Don't confuse yourself with random obiter statements from some niche trusts case law you may have remembered from ages ago or how the common law position has developed and changed over the years that you may have written about in an essay once upon a time in your LLB. All of this legal spaghetti is not at all relevant for the SQE1. For SQE1, you only need to know what is the most clear cut position either in statute or common law in a given situation as at the examinable cut off date for your exam - that's it. And I've found that the easiest and least time-consuming way of doing that is to go straight to the ULaw manuals lol it was basically my Bible for the whole year.Also me being an idiot I didn't know ULaw had this till like 4 weeks before my exam — on the SQE manuals page for the academic law manuals there are bite sized videos for each chapter. Watch those videos before you make notes or flashcard each chapter lol - will make it easier for you to see the big picture before you spend hours trying to memorise the fine print before you've even understood the big picture of the topic. I wish I had known this earlier and started watching the bite-sized videos before properly studying each chapter.In terms of balancing academic law vs practical modules, I don't think you can necessarily dictate that you must spend 50% of your time overall on academic law and 50% on the practice modules. Overall I think I probably spent more time on the practice modules(...?), but mainly because it was content I was learning for the very first time and it took more time for me to digest it. Plus a lot of your time on the course will be taken up by workshops for those practice modules. Whereas for the academic law modules idk how to explain it but I think if you've done the GDL or LLB the material will kind of just feel like an extension of stuff you already know? Basically I think for academic law I felt like I didn't need a lot of time to actually understand any difficult concepts whereas for the practice modules you probably need to give yourself more time to actually understand the concept at the first instance. For academic law the concepts are quite straightforward and I never really found myself sitting in front of my computer staring and trying to understand any difficult concepts but for practice modules for certain topics this was certainly the case. The only thing I found difficult with academic law was just the sheer volume of content you need to get through and learn how to apply in SBAQs, so though you probably wouldn't find yourself perplexed by any complicated legal concepts, you would still find yourself needing many hours just to get through the amount of law you need to know. If you read ULaw's academic law manuals you'll understand what I mean - it is pretty much written in such a way that gives away what the simple straight answer is to a legal question is and you just take that as a matter of fact and practise applying it to different fact patterns in SBAQs.See my post on "Note-taking and flashcards" above (soz I'm not quoting it in this post because it is quite long) — you should be able to build a study plan out of ULaw's materials on ELITE week by week. During the time I did the course the weekly practice tests contain questions to test both your practice and academic law knowledge. So you just need to try your very best to keep up with learning the content for both week to week and get some practice SBAQs for both academic and practical modules every week as well - not just through the weekly practice tests but also extra questions from the question bank for both academic and practical law if you can manage it (basically just reiterating what I say above about exercising your application muscle earlier on in the course - smth I wish I had done). When I was at ULaw we had workshops 3 days a week. I didn't really set a strict timetable for myself to only do practice law 3 days and academic law 2 days. Because sometimes you will find that in a particular week the practice modules might turn out to be heavier than you expected, which will leave less time for academic law revision, or vice versa. What worked better for me was not necessarily setting in stone the proportion or quantity of time I wanted to spend on academic vs practical law, but first having a very specific plan of what content (both academic and practical) I need to cover within any given week, then, I decide how much time I need to allocate to each subject to check off the content I need to learn. I would usually aim to cover the content I needed for workshops the following week by the Sunday before - in reality I found myself playing catch up a lot the day before the workshop though lol but if you can stay a week ahead that will of course be best.I do remember though that no matter how hard it got I made sure I was doing SOME academic law revision every week though and really made sure that I was checking off most of the chapters on my study plan each week and I'm glad I did this. I remember there was one week I let it slip completely because I was ill and bruh it was not fun catching up and there were many meltdowns. You can put it off if you are really tired and if personal circumstances do get in the way. But I would say you really need to make sure you don't let your academic law revision snowball too much and instil discipline to make sure you stay on top of it week to week. It can be tempting to do so because the workshops don't cover academic law so technically you are not directly pushed to know anything about academic law to contribute in the practical law workshops week to week. To survive the workshops you just need to make sure you at least have done the practical law prep. But for the purposes of the exam you do need to stay on top of your academic law just as much from week to week, even if your tutors never mention anything of it in the workshops. But if it does snowball for whatever reason, just make sure you make a plan to help yourself catch up. If you don't have time to revise comprehensively your usual way, just find some alternative to help you get through it in the interim, and make a note to make sure you come back to it later.Ngl organisation was not my strong suit lol so my progress for balancing academic and practical law was very patchy despite my best efforts haha. But if you can make a rough study plan at the start of the course and adjust it as a you go along (depending on how tricky you find the practice modules to be and how quickly you can work through the academic law materials) you should be alright. The key for me was having a set plan for specifically which chapters of academic law and which chapters of practical law you need to cover week to week and try your very very best to stay on top of it so you can be sure that you are on track to cover all of the spec (both academic and practice) by your exam date.Don't sweat about the pre-course diagnostic test. I did it one week before my course started having graduated my LLB a year ago at the point of taking it and I scored like 71% I think. My friend who graduated with a first for her LLB from Durham just two months before taking the test also scored around the same. So I don't think the 'diagnostics' are actually accurate to any extent lol. I think if you have any super elementary grasp of English law you will be able to at least pass. And as far as I can remember it will have no bearing on your course - it is just for you to assess for yourself where you are in terms of your academic law. But imo it's low key false hope and it's not a true indicator of where your academic law knowledge is lol cause if I had stopped there and gone into the exam with no further academic law revision I would have definitely failed SQE1. So my actual grasp of the academic law required to pass at that point more realistically should have been like 1% haha, definitely not 71%. So don't worry too much about it - just click through it and see where you place. Even if you fail it doesn't matter lol as long as you have a solid academic law study plan moving forward as you progress through the course. But also don't take any comfort from it if you do pass lol. As I said above my actual academic law knowledge needed for SQE1 at that point was more realistically a 1%. So just ignore the pre-diagnostic test and execute your academic and practical law study plan religiously to make sure you are prepared for the exam.</blockquote>

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