One Thing Can Improve All Your Law School Grades

What if I told you there was one thing you could do in your 1L year that would improve your grades in all your classes?

Test failWhat if I told you there was one thing you could do in your 1L year that would improve your grades in all your classes? If that was the reward I imagine there’d be a line of desperado law students begging to find the secret to a successful law school career.

Well, it isn’t science fiction. There is new research from Dan Schwarcz andDion Farganis at University of Minnesota Law School suggesting that law students who get individualized feedback from their professor in one subject are more likely to do better in ALL their classes. Given this experiment was conducted on 1L students, all mired in core requirements, this information could have a profound impact on the way the law is taught.

The paper’s abstract lays out the foundation of the research:

The natural experiment arises from the random assignment of first-year law students to sections that take a common slate of classes, only some of which provide individualized feedback. Meanwhile, students in two different sections are occasionally grouped together into a “double section” first-year class. In these double section classes, students in sections that have previously or concurrently had a class providing individualized feedback consistently outperform students in sections that have not received any such feedback. The effect is both statistically significant and hardly trivial in magnitude, approaching about 1/3 of a grade increment even after controlling for students’ LSAT scores, undergraduate GPA, gender, race, and country of birth. The positive impact of feedback also appears to be stronger among lower-performing students. These findings substantially advance the literature on law school pedagogy, demonstrating that individualized feedback in a single class during the first-year of law school can improve law students’ performance in all of their other classes.

Can you imagine a world where law professors did more than torture students with the Socratic method and then give a single test at the very end of the semester? Maybe if professors actually gave specific feedback to students there wouldn’t be as much backlash when they reuse prior exams.

Anyone who has completed law school knows all too well the deficiencies of the dominant mode of legal education. Drinking from the firehose without any idea if what you’re doing is even working, oh and by the way, these grades will be used to determine your future employment prospects. Good luck trying not to freak out about that. The paper’s authors do a good job of detailing the fundamental issues with the process:

For almost as long as this educational model has been in place, critics have emphasized its pedagogical deficiencies. Effective education, these critics suggest, requires students to receive “frequent formative assessments that provide students with the opportunity to gauge their progress as they acquire new skills.” To be effective, such feedback must generally be promptly provided to students, at a time when they remain immersed within the underlying material and capable of adjusting their approach. This feedback, moreover, should specifically identify the strengths and weaknesses of students’ performance so as to focus students’ efforts. The single, end-of-semester, law school exam fails along each of these dimensions: feedback is provided at a single point in time, well after students have completed the class, without any specificity about what the student did and did not do well. As a result, final exams in law school operate predominantly to sort students in to different categories, but do little to promote learning.

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As one might imagine there are lots of reactions to anything that suggests law professors should do anything but exactly what they’ve done for a millennia. The good news is some of the reactions are encouraging! Georgetown Law professor Lawrence Solum notes he scheduled 70 individual assessments of midterms with students:

It is a great relief to hear that there may be a systemic benefit from the time invested in giving feedback in this way. I am also happy to learn that I have avoided liability for educational malpractice.

And the note to students is to take advantage of the opportunity professors give you, it can make a real difference in your legal career.

Others, like Michael Simkovic are encouraged but skeptical. He thinks that the professors offering feedback already might just be better actual teachers, which may be true, but making bad teachers give more feedback would still help students. To assume otherwise is a problematic educational philosophy of “you’re either a naturally gifted teacher or you suck.”

Simkovic also wonders:

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[A]re students simply learning how to take law school exams? Or are they actually learning the material better in a way that will provide long-term benefits, either in bar passage rates or in job performance? At the moment, the data is not sufficient to know one way or the other.

This seems like a weird forced choice. What exactly do exams reflect if not mastery of material with — supposedly — long-term benefits? If it’s anything else, then maybe you’re writing terrible exams. Even if the material a professor swears by isn’t practically useful, passing exams necessarily benefits student’s legal careers. Years after you graduate future employers will still ask for your law school grades. And mastering the art of law school exams will help you pass the bar. These things are related after all.

The take away is still overall positive. The accumulation of evidence to finally prove that the way law school classes are taught is antiquated simply must be a good thing.

The Impact of Individualized Feedback on Law Student Performance [SSRN]
Schwarcz & Farganis on Farganis (University of Minnesota Law School) have posted the Impact of Individualized Feedback on Law Student Performance [Legal Theory Blog]
Should professors give more feedback before the final exam? [Law School Reports]


Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).