Law Schools

Stanford Law Review Write-On Competition Hit With Cheating Scandal

Bluebookers seeing red after some students apparently tried to cheat their way onto law review.

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Elementary students taking a test in classroom.Moments after the soul-crushing pressure of 1L year culminates in a series of inscrutable issue spotters, students throw themselves into another crucible in a bid to get themselves onto law review. Spending your first weekend of freedom scouring the Bluebook isn’t fun, but law review membership delivers an enduring resume boost, so what are you going to do? And you get to put your name out there as part of the team marshaling the cutting-edge of legal scholarship… unless you’re at Columbia, where the board will try to scrub the internet of your existence.

So when allegations of cheating spring up, students scrambling for law review’s brass ring get understandably edgy.

Stanford Law Review just concluded its competition amid multiple reports of students cheating on the exercise by working together. And while “we think everyone else is cheating” reports crop up in a lot of write-on competitions, the student leadership of Stanford’s law review confirmed the allegations in an email to applicants:

I am sending this second email to inform all candidates that a very small number of submissions were not rejected because of their editing scores or personal statements. While preprocessing the exams, we found that a small minority of editing components shared an extraordinary number of unique mistakes. These exams were rejected for those similarities.

We take cheating on the Candidate Exercise seriously, not only because spots on SLR are so competitive, but also because we ask for such a substantial time commitment from all those who agree to take it. With a limited number of spots, to cheat on the CE is to cheat a qualified and deserving classmate out of a fair and equal consideration.

Tipsters aren’t satisfied, with one saying that the law review leadership email “minimize[s] the extent of the cheating, despite its known, widespread nature.”

It’s possible that the cheating ran deeper than the judges acknowledge, but it’s also worth remembering that they’re the only ones looking at the receipts and the best positioned to identify collusion. Absent clear indicia of cheating, the risk of a false positive is substantial. Unlike reasoning out the vagaries of torts, proper citation is fairly cut-and-dried. It’s hard to compose an exam where a lot of applicants have the same correct and incorrect answers, meaning it takes a lot of similarities to definitively finger a cheating ring.

The folks running the competition don’t have an incentive to excuse cheating. Given the difficulty involved in writing a cheat-proof citation exam, they don’t even have an incentive to downplay the risks to shield themselves from criticism in writing an easy test. They’re trying to root it out as best they can and if they aren’t able to catch everyone on the face of the completed assignment, then people need to come forward with more corroborating evidence or there’s not much more they can do.

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Sometimes applicants will have the same answers just because there are only so many ways to cite something in a source about skinning cats.

It’s 19 U.S.C. § 1308, by the way.

(Email reproduced in relevant part on next page…)

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