I sucked my 1L first semester. My GPA over the next 5 semesters was equivalent to summa, and I graduated magna.
I read a book about law exams that explained it this way: your job is to set 100 placesettings at a picnic, 10 each at 10 tables (the 100 points or so available on an exam). You have just enough time to clean up the site (spot issues, outline the question into a framework of analysis, etc., before writing), staple paper tablecloths to each wooden table, and lay out chinette paper plates, paper cups, plastic cutlery, napkins, etc. Another person across the picnic ground from you has the same job for his 100 guests. If, when your guests arrive, you're polishing fine china and silver goblets at the first table, and the other 9 tables haven't been set, you get a C. If the guy on the other side of the picnicground has a paper plate, paper cup, and plastic cutlery for all 100 guests, he gets an A+.
You can't bullsh!t law professors with the type of verbiage a tenured English Lit professor, explicating Finnegans Wake for native Martian speakers, would use. Over the course of the semester, you're not just learning rules, you're fitting them into a logical framework of analysis. The professor is proud of writing an ambiguous hypo with no clear answer for any one issue, encompassing most/all of what you talked about during the semester. You're going to piss him/her off if you write "Clearly, the parol evidence rule requires...", or "Clearly, X's act implicates negligence per se", or "Clearly ANYTHING, so I don't have to analyze the legal alternative."
ALL the Note cases illustrate some elucidation of or exception to the rules/analysis from the principal case. They're ALL part of the exam. You can't polish a silver goblet on the philosophy of consideration or Learned Hand's duty formula. You have to engage EACH and EVERY fact in the hypo, affix to it a rule of law, and analyze accordingly. A short paragraph for each. Each side of the question. Nothing is CLEAR. Everything is ambiguous and double-sided and requires you to know and briefly hit on each side.
My 1L first semester exams in CivPro and Ks and Torts were 20+ page C and B- conclusory pieces of crap. My 3L A+ exams in Labor Arb and Admin and Corporations were 6-8 page, "brevity is the soul of wit" engagements of the facts of the hypo with the rules of law and analysis discussed in class and the casebook, with brief hits on alternatives from the note cases and on policy rationales, etc.
You can do the same thing. Everybody has their own advice. I would leave you with 3 words: framework of analysis. The logical structer of rule/analysis triggered by a given nugget of fact. "X will say that Y's conduct in (engage fact here) violated the statute passed by the state and was negligence per se. (Analysis, policy rationale, all on the surface, no goblet-polishing). Y will say, because of (engage ambiguous second fact here), the harm done was not that targeted by the statute, so it is not negligence per se (analysis, etc.)." ALL without getting BOGGED DOWN. Your professor is testing everything, or almos everything, you talked about for 3 1/2 months. It's all there in the convoluted hypo. That's why you HAVE to spend a good amount of time preparing to type: reading/re-reading the hypo an call, extracting issues from the fact pattern, fitting the issues into the analsis framework you've developed, etc.