Digital Highlighting for Law School Exams: How to Make the Most of On-Screen Questions

Back in 1L year, many of us treated highlighting like a form of art. Rainbow-colored casebooks, color-coded outlines, and highlighter packs straight from an office supply fantasy aisle. But things have changed.

You’re no longer reading hard copy materials—or if you are, that’s not how you’ll take your final exams. Most law students now face fully digital exams, often through platforms like Examplify, where exam questions are on-screen only, and you’re working in a locked-down testing environment.

You won’t have your casebook. You won’t be flipping through a printed fact pattern. You’ll be reading on-screen, scrolling, and trying to spot key issues while managing time, stress, and a blinking cursor.

That’s where digital highlighting comes in—not as a gimmick, but as a critical reading strategy.

Let’s make it work for you.

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

What Doesn’t Work: Mindless Highlighting

We've all done it: highlight half a paragraph because it "seems important" and then stare at a wall of yellow. In law school, this is often the result of anxiety or the belief that more highlighting equals better comprehension. But in reality, mindless highlighting is just that—mindless. It's passive and reactive, driven more by fear of missing something than by clarity of thought. It leads to entire passages being marked with no clear purpose, which only makes it harder to find what actually matters.

In the digital testing environment, this kind of highlighting is not only unhelpful—it’s dangerous. Why? Because you can’t skim as easily on a screen as you can on paper. When your eyes have to scroll, search, and re-read, your highlights need to guide you. Mindless highlighting just creates clutter and increases cognitive load.

Instead, the goal is functional highlighting—a focused, intentional technique that supports your legal analysis instead of distracting from it.

The Goal: Use Digital Highlighting to Sort, Not Decorate

Think of digital highlighting like setting bookmarks in your brain. Unlike mindless highlighting, which simply paints over text without distinction, functional highlighting is about making smart, deliberate choices that support how you read, think, and write. It’s not just about what looks important—it’s about marking exactly what you’ll use in your legal analysis.

Functional highlighting allows you to:

🔎 Locate key facts quickly

🔎 Track the legal issues

🔎 Organize the timeline

🔎 Visually distinguish roles, dates, rules, and red flags

When you return to the question during outlining or writing, those highlights act as shortcuts to your IRAC structure. If done well, you’ll be able to answer the question faster, more clearly, and with fewer rereads of the fact pattern.

A Simple Color-Coding System That Works

Most digital testing software allows you to highlight in multiple colors—typically two or three. Even if you only get one, using a consistent system for what that color means helps build mental clarity.

If you do have multiple colors, try this:

Color	Use For	Why It Helps
Orange	Key facts and conduct	Central to legal analysis
Blue	Legal buzzwords or rules	Helps cue IRAC rule statements
Pink	Names, dates, or parties	Tracks timelines and shifting roles

Example:

On April 1, Dana, a contractor, entered into an agreement to renovate a homeowner’s kitchen for $30,000, with work to begin on May 1. On April 15, the homeowner hired a different contractor, claiming Dana had failed to communicate.

Highlights might look like this:

🖊️ Orange: “entered into an agreement … $30,000” and “hired a different contractor … Dana had failed to communicate”

🖊️ Blue: “agreement,” “contractor”

🖊️ Pink: “April 1,” “April 15,” “May 1”

This gives you a visual map of the issue (possible breach of contract, anticipatory repudiation, etc.), without rereading everything.

Tips for Practicing Digital Highlighting in Law School

1. Decide on Your Color System—And Practice It Now

Don't invent your color code on exam day. Use it during practice exams, quizzes, and even cold calls in class. Train your brain to associate each color with a type of information. The earlier you build this habit, the more automatic and useful it becomes under pressure.

2. Be Selective, Not Artistic

Limit yourself to 1–2 lines of highlighting per paragraph. If everything is important, nothing is important. You want contrast, not a highlighter explosion. Strategic restraint forces you to think critically about what matters most in the fact pattern.

3. Start with the Call of the Question

Highlight the “call” first, then work your way back through the fact pattern. That way, your highlighting is purposeful—you’re looking for facts that help answer that specific question. This method anchors your analysis from the start and keeps your reading focused.

4. Practice on Real Exam Software

Examplify’s highlight function isn’t fancy. It’s not Google Docs. You’ll want to be familiar with how it selects, toggles between colors (if allowed), and how to un-highlight. Build muscle memory now.

Final Thought: Highlight Like You Mean It

In a digital exam world, the highlighter tool isn’t optional—it’s strategic.

Don’t use it out of habit. Use it to take control of the question. Whether you're prepping for midterms, finals, or upper-level doctrinal exams, intentional digital highlighting can reduce anxiety, sharpen your thinking, and make your writing more efficient.

So the next time you launch Examplify or open a practice hypo on your screen, don’t just scroll through the question.

Highlight with purpose—and let your screen guide your success.