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Is There Sufficient Human Resource Capacity to Support Robust Professional Identity Formation Learning Outcomes?
No full textIn his article, Integrity: Its Causes and Cures, David Luban notes that if you think about integrity in terms of consistency between beliefs/principles and actions/conduct, there are two ways to accomplish consistency. One is the “high road,” in which one changes one’s actions/behavior to conform to one’s principles. One is the “low road,” in which one modifies one’s principles to conform to one’s actions/behavior. These dilemmas arise for institutions as well as for individuals.
In the next several years, as law schools with robust learning outcomes associated with professional identity formation prepare for their ABA Sabbatical Site Visit associated with ongoing accreditation, those schools with robust learning outcomes will have to make a decision. One choice might be to conform their actions to their principles—Luban’s “high road”—by finding ways to measure and assess student performance regarding these more robust professional formation outcomes. Another choice, however, might be to conform their principles to their actions—Luban’s “low road”—by amending their learning outcomes if it just seems too difficult to teach and to assess development of these more robust aspects of professional identity formation. The faculty at these law schools may have aspired in their initial drafts of their learning outcomes to pursue these robust learning outcomes associated with professional identity formation and to develop curricular interventions and means of assessment to determine whether their students and graduates have progressed on these learning outcomes. But they may discover that developing the curricular interventions and the means of assessment is more difficult than they had anticipated, resulting not in further efforts to do better, but in further efforts to reform the learning outcomes to be more “realistic” and more easily accomplished.
Do most law schools have sufficient human resource capacity, particularly among their full-time faculty members, to accomplish what needs to happen in terms of generating developmental rubrics, curricular interventions, and corresponding assessment tools to support robust learning outcomes related to aspects of professional formation? Perhaps not, particularly if these professional formation learning outcomes require development of new measures of performance and new methods of assessment
Law Student Debt: Changes from 2008 to 2012 and Implications for the Future
No full textIn 2012, graduate students borrowed more than 122,000 in 2012. Increasing education debt may discourage students from even considering enrollment and/or may motivate degree completers to seek more lucrative jobs after graduation simply to pay off loans. Additional implications are discussed
For Native American Attorneys, NNABA Groundbreaking Study Reveals Devastating Lack of Inclusion in the Legal Profession at Large
No full textThis year marks the 40th anniversary of the Federal Bar Association’s Indian Law Conference. The theme is 40 Years Strong: The Indian Self-Determination Era Strengthening Tribal Sovereignty. While tribal sovereignty has been strengthened over time, the status and inclusion of Native American attorneys remain challenging at best, particularly in the legal profession at large. In 2014, there were a number of firsts for Native American attorneys. Hon. Diane Humetewa became the first Native American woman in our nation’s history to become a federal judge. Keith Harper became the first Native American to achieve the rank of ambassador by becoming the U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council. These achievements are certainly monumental. What stands out, however, is that before 2014, the legal profession had never formally studied the perceptions, experiences, and career trajectories of Native American attorneys
Law School Net Tuition
No full textSchool-specific tuition and scholarship data come from the American Bar Association. Net tuition is an estimate based on nominal full-time tuition and full-time scholarship data. The estimates at public law schools are higher than reality because net tuition was calculated using resident tuition at public schools. In order to more accurately estimate net tuition, scholarship data, as well as enrollment data, would need to distinguish between residents and non-residents. Law School Transparency uses normal averages rather than weighted averages for the group averages
How to Build a Better Bar Exam
No full textAs a licensing exam, the purpose of the bar exam is consumer protection–-ensuring that new lawyers have the minimum competencies required to practice law effectively. As critics point out, however, the exam, and particularly the multiple-choice question portion of the exam, has significant flaws because it assesses legal knowledge and analysis in an artificial and unrealistic context, and the closed-book format rewards the ability to memorize thousands of legal rules, a skill unrelated to law practice.
This essay discusses how to improve the exam by changing its multiple-choice content and format. We use two law licensing exams to illustrate how bar examiners could utilize an open-book format and develop multiple-choice questions that assess a candidate’s ability to engage in legal reasoning and analysis without demanding unproductive memorization of so many detailed rules of law. The first example, the case file approach, is drawn from a 1983 California “Performance Test” in which test-takers received a case file and a series of multiple-choice questions testing the candidates’ ability to read, understand, and use cases to support their legal positions. The second example discusses the current licensing exam administered by The Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), an open-book multiple-choice exam that tests the use of doctrinal knowledge in the context of law practice.
These two licensing exams demonstrate how we could re-structure the bar exam’s multiple-choice questions to measure legal analysis and reasoning skills as lawyers use those skills to represent clients. They also demonstrate that we can do a better job of testing some aspects of minimum competence, while still using a multiple-choice exam format
Law School Assessment in the Context of Accreditation: Critical Questions, What We Know and Don\u27t Know, and What We Should Do Next
No full textThe essay proceeds in several parts. Part I provides important background about student learners now in law school or in the pipeline to attend law school in coming years. Since the focus of assessment is on student learning, it is crucial to understand the individuals whose learning is being assessed. Applying assessment practices historically developed for learners with different characteristics can result in mistaken judgments or missed opportunities for understanding and shaping the learning occurring today.
Part II considers assessment practices increasingly associated with academic support programs introduced into legal education in the past quarter-century. Many faculty members were not exposed to academic support programming during their time in law school, because they sailed through their law school careers with little difficulty and thus did not experience some of the challenges that many in more recent generations of law students know all too well. Some faculty members may indeed regard academic support programming as remedial, assuming that those involved in this instructional area lack scholarly insights or exist in a world apart. Contrary to these assumptions, however, those engaged in academic support instruction are typically deeply knowledgeable about cognitive sciences and learning theory. They are among law schools’ best resources for guiding the implementation of the new ABA requirements on assessment, and faculty colleagues need to understand the scholarly insights emerging in this new field.
Part III considers assessment processes increasingly being introduced by innovative faculty members who are experimenting with diverse forms of ‘formative assessment’—that is, introducing new types of educational practices into their courses and testing the extent to which such practices improve student learning. ‘Formative assessments’ differ from ‘summative assessments’ typically used to award grades at the end of a course. ‘Formative assessments’ simply provide students with educational tasks and some sort of feedback to help them become more aware of what they do or do not know, and to help build ‘scaffolds’ for subsequent learning. The new ABA standards direct law schools to incorporate more opportunities for ‘formative assessment’ in their instructional programs, while being clear that such techniques need not be employed in every class. Nonetheless, faculty colleagues who wish to experiment with such innovations need to know what types of formative assessment strategies are being developed by colleagues around the country, and may wish to learn how colleagues are themselves assessing whether such innovations actually make a difference in student learning.
Part IV turns to ‘institutional assessment,’ and the ways that law schools as institutions can approach new ABA requirements that mandate them to identify and assess their students’ learning through certain lenses or with an eye to certain ‘competences’ that are needed by legal professionals and that may increasingly be embedded in evolving bar examination practices or considered by prospective employers when recruiting students or evaluating associates early in their careers. ‘Institutional assessment’ practices typically necessitate collaborative efforts among faculty colleagues and between faculty and professional staff in order to determine the critical dimensions of learning to be assessed, across a number of courses and over the several years that students are enrolled. These critical dimensions are increasingly referred to as ‘programmatic learning outcomes.’ Once programmatic learning outcomes have been identified and adopted, additional challenges arise. How can a school and its faculty and professional staff collectively determine whether the desired outcomes have been achieved by their student bodies as a whole? Part IV accordingly proceeds in two major subparts, first considering learning outcomes and related questions, and then considering potential assessment techniques. Institutional assessment is by no means easy, and most faculty members, deans, and associate deans are unfamiliar with core concepts and methods. This part accordingly endeavors to help law schools and their faculties to get up to speed as they embark on this new journey.
In concluding, Part V engages in a modest thought experiment, suggesting that legal education’s specialized accreditor, the ABA’s Council on Legal Education, should engage more seriously in the kind of sound assessment practices that it has now mandated for law schools and their faculties. It references good practices used in other professional fields as a means of testing collective judgments about and updating appropriate accreditation practices, and suggests that the ABA would do well to practice what it preaches—or, indeed, demands
Using Science to Build Better Learners: One School\u27s Successful Efforts to Raise Its Bar Passage Rates in an Era of Decline
No full textBar examination pass rates are plummeting. Many laws schools are searching urgently for some way to stem the tide of decline. Silver bullet cure-alls are attractive, all too often adopted, and almost never fruitful. So what should schools do?
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The right questions do not focus on what we can do to change results but on what students can do for themselves. Although scholars have rightly focused on how to change curricula and pedagogy to meet the current crisis, there is far less research on changing what students do instead of what law schools do. My claim in this Essay is that proposals to change law schools, while certainly significant, tend to overlook the important fact that most students learn and study wrong; fixing that ailment is where the academy should focus its attention.
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This Essay will detail how to begin to make that happen. Using the example of recent successful efforts at Florida International University College of Law (\u27FIU Law;), this piece will detail some of the cognitive science and educational psychology methods that build better learners. Part Two discusses FIU Law’s recent approach of expressly teaching cognitive science and educational psychology concepts to law students. Part Two also briefly discusses the successes our students have achieved in the wake of those changes -- earning the top bar exam pass rate in Florida in five of the last six exams. Part Three then details the theories of cognitive science and educational psychology that facilitate more optimal learning: metacognition and self-regulated learning; retrieval practice; spaced repetition; and cognitive schema. Part Four then constructs a broader picture of these methods, noting how to leverage specific study methods that lead to better learning for law school, the bar exam, and a life of practicing law
A Statistical Exploration: Analyzing the Relationship (If Any) between Externship Participation and Bar Exam Scores
No full textRelatively recently, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) claims that experiential legal education might negatively harm bar passage performance. Nevertheless, experiential learning opportunities, and, in particular, externships, are some of the most meaningful educational opportunities available to law school students. That raises an important empirical question, given the increasing emphasis of legal educators in providing more experiential learning opportunities for law students and the widespread participation of students, especially in externship programs, as one type of experiential learning opportunity. Do externship experiences have demonstrable value in positively influencing bar exam outcomes, or, as the NCBE seems to suggest, do externships negatively impact bar exam outcomes? This article walks step-by-step through the process of evaluating whether externship participation at our law school has any statistical relationship to bar exam scores, particularly for academically-struggling law school students. Initially, using longitudinal bar passage data over a three-year period, this study observes that students participating in externships positively outperform non-participants in bar passage rates, particularly for those students that struggled academically in law school. However, based on further statistical evaluation using regression analysis, this article finds that externship participation (to include number of externships taken) has no observable statistical relationship to bar exam scores, either positive or negative, leading to the conclusion that the NCBE’s claim, at least based on our bar takers with respect to externship participation, seems to be without merit
Financing Graduate and Professional Education: How Students Pay
Get PDFThis brief examines how students finance their graduate and professional education. It summarizes the sources of funds used to cover the tuition and fees universities charge, as well as living expenses. Institutions set a “cost of attendance” (COA) for students, estimating the average budget for one academic year (fall through spring). COA includes tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, and other living expenses, and it establishes the maximum amount students can borrow in federal student loans to attend a particular school. These official budgets serve as the foundation for the discussion that follows about how graduate and professional degree students pay for their education. It is critical to understand that COA is subjective. Since most graduate students do not live in campus housing, actual living expenses depend on local prices for food and housing, as well as the lifestyle choices students make. As the data herein reveal, the budgets institutions set for graduate and professional students are frequently quite generous relative to budgets set for undergraduate students and living standards set by the federal government. Many students use earnings from employment and federal loans to fund their graduate and professional education. But financing patterns differ a great deal across and within types of programs. This brief explores these patterns by describing average budgets for graduate and professional degree students and the funding sources used to cover these budgets
Law School Graduate Debt
No full textSchool-specific borrowing data come from U.S. News & World Report, which relies on data reported to U.S. News by law schools. In a few cases over the years, law schools did not report the percentage borrowing properly. When that occurs, the previous year\u27s rate is used unless a school reports the correct rate to Law School Transparency or a better estimate can be generated. Graduate data come from the American Bar Association. LST uses weighted averages rather than normal averages for the group and nationwide averages. Salary information is voluntarily reported and published by law schools