Law School Discussion

http://www.filecabi.net/video/butter-floor.html   

Penny.... Let's not go there. It can get messy. I know about your sordid past.

HEY!  STEP OFF MAH WOMAN!

Aww Penny...it'll happen any day now!

Quote from: Butters Stotch on November 13, 2007, 06:59:35 PM

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What Surprised You the Most as a 1L?

The utter god-awfulness of law school in general, really.

There you go butter stotch, strike fear into the heats of 0L's

My mission at this point is to talk as many 0L's out of law school as possible. 

OL's:  We don't need another lawyer.  Go be productive.  Write the next great American novel.  Cure cancer.  Work to get NASCAR banned.  Anything but law school.

Quote from: studymaster on November 08, 2007, 12:55:47 AM

Quote from: Miss P on November 04, 2007, 02:36:21 PM

Quote from: Miss Celies Blues on November 04, 2007, 01:43:27 AM

Quote from: Butters Stotch on November 04, 2007, 01:53:26 AM

not only is the class graded, it is subject to the same curve as torts, k's, con law, etc   

that sucks

It does.  In our legal writing sections of 16-17, professors can award a maximum of two As, and then only if they offset the "second" one with a grade of C- or lower for another person in the class.  I don't think this helps people's employment prospects.  Grading legal writing on a curve is ridiculous.  If you're good you should get an A, decent but could use improvement, a B, etc.

Out of curiousity, I dont see how this applies to legal writign exclusivley, why woudl you condone one for other classes but not this one. (assuming you do..)

I don't support the curve in general.  I think people should be graded according to their achievements and skills, not the achievements and skills of their peers.  It makes sense to adjust the scale to account for factors that affected the whole class (e.g., if no one understands, say, the rule against perpetuities, then perhaps it wasn't taught well and the professor should discount the effect of those wrong answers on the final score) but not to grade students along a rigid curve when the distribution of their knowledge and abilities may be completely different.  The curve is so artificial.  It's weird that you have to remind people of that sometimes.

Nonetheless, I think it's different in legal writing classes for four reasons: (1) it is skill-based, unlike most of the first-year curriculum; (2) legal writing sections are small and therefore more sensitive to biases of class distribution; (3) many employers consider it the most important class of the first year; and, most important, (4) at most higher-ranked schools, legal writing is either ungraded or graded off-curve, and thus, students coming from a school with curved legal writing are at a distinct disadvantage unless the people who look at their transcripts are aware of the school's peculiar grading system.

This is dead on balls accurate.