I assume you are about to begin at Cooley in the fall?
The Intro to Law I class at Cooley is mandatory. And if you don't pass it, you will not be allowed to enroll in any future law courses accept for Intro to Law until you pass it. Attendance is required. Only a few students lose credit in it in any particular semester, and that's likely because they did not hand in their work.
It's a two hour class, but worth no credit hours, and you are not (directly) charged tuition for it. The first hour you meet in a large classroom to discuss briefing, outlining, IRAC'ing, etc. The second hour, you split off into a smaller group (which is when attendance is taken). You are only allowed to miss class once without documentation before losing credit. For your typical 3 credit law courses, you are allowed to miss twice. Grading for the course is credit/no-credit. You must achieve at least 75% of the total points to pass, although I suspect that the adjunct professors often bend this rule a little due to the enrollment suspension policy. I don't believe a lot of people get this 75%, but are passed anyway. Grading for the course is credit/no-credit. The last day of the course you take an exam over Torts I and Contracts I in a similar format to the real finals.
I found the class worthwhile only for the practice it provides in learning to write exam answers, and the practice exam. Most students do not brief exams after their first semester, realizing it is a waste of time. I find outlines helpful only as a 'checklist'. Only about half of students or less continue to outline after the first semester, depending on what works for them for studying.
During orientation you will likely receive Dean Timmer's advice of reading cases "3 times" and then briefing them. This is a joke. She claims she worked full time, went to school full time, graduated summa cum laude, and read her cases over three times and that this is how she got all her A's. (Yeah, right!) You will not feel like reading these cases 3 times over, nor will you have the time, and it would be a waste to do so unless the particular case is a difficult one to comprehend. The sample cases in your casebook do NOT cover all the minutiae under any particular topic. For that matter, neither does the professor. A good hornbook does, however. If the professor chooses to give MBE (multi-state bar exam) multiple choice questions as half of the final exam (as if often the case in lower level classes), you may find that there will be questions you do not understand unless you have gone through a hornbook (unless the teacher is good about editing out such questions -- actually, most include them on purpose!).
Most of the top achieving students I know of (including myself) rely mainly on hornbooks at Cooley. I prefer the Aspen series (written in textbook format so that you actually learn) to some of the other hornbooks like Emanuels (which are not really in textbook format, so that you end up memorizing).
Discussion
Resources
