To those who have done it already. Lucky ones ;) I'm doing an LLM at QM UoL. Now getting really nervous before the exams. I 've heard there are subjects with higher rate of students who didn't manage to get a pass. Do you know what are they? Did you do for example Arbitration or EC Competition? Please share your experience. I'm really scared.

Alex, it is not "easy" to fail the London LLM, but it is not impossible. In my LLM year two people I knew failed the exam. They had to reappear one year later (I am not sure whether they passed then).

However, you should not be scared. All the other students I knew (around 30-50) passed the exam, many of them achieved a merit and some even a distinction.

You should should understand how the exam papers work and practice with the past year's exam questions. These are often general statements ending with "Discuss." Some foreign educated law students are not used to these kind of general questions and do not know how to answer them in a way that demonstrates their knowlegde of the subject.

I did the EC Competition Law paper and got a merit. By the way, you can even fail in one subject and still pass the whole exam if you have good results in the other subjects.

Good luck
Russ

As you probably already know, you can find the LLM Examination Papers Database at http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/llm/llm.htm

Russ, first of all congrats on your merits in EC Competition! What were your main books for this subject? Do you think that reading summaries of cases will suffice? Anyway you don't get enoug time at the exam to write all you know about a case. You're right that the exams might be difficult for people from other jurisdictions. Especially if one doesn't have much experience with writing in English. Time can be a real enemy. But what you said made me feel better. Thanks a million.

I used the D.G. Goyder, EC Competition Law. A friend and I tried to collect "hot topics" (the professors also gave hints about that in the last classes) and we discussed and wrote down how our answers could be. Luckily we were not too bad with our guesses.