Is your school "cut throat"?

[FLgirl07]

I am still deciding which schools I'd like to apply to and one of my main concern is how cut-throat the students are.  Since you all are already in law school, please share your experiences.

--Is your school cut-throat or insanely competitive?
--Do people tear pages out of books in the library so you won't have access to them?
--Are students wiling to share notes with you if you miss class?
--Are students friendly?
--Do you have genuine friends at the law school?
--Any other things/experiences you may be willing to share.

Edit ---If you are willing, please state which school you attend.

[LVP]

I'm at Michigan State.  My answers are:

No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes

There are a few students here with a pretty competitive attitude.  For example, some students won't ask questions when the prof holds a review session because they don't want the other students to have the answer to the question.  But for the most part, everyone's friendly and not too competitive.

The thing is, there is The Curve, so competition is forced on us.  So to some extent, if you try to be completely non-competitive, it's almost like you're ignoring reality.  But I don't really think a competitive attitude helps anyone in the end.  I'm happy to share my notes with anyone, help anyone understand something, even share my outline or something, and I'm top of my class, but then again, a couple of those really competitive people are also right near the top of our class as well, so who knows?

[mecarr]

I agree. At my law school I do not sense any real competition. People just try and do the best they can and that's it. Don't believe all those horror stories, it's not that bad.

[eqmassa]

at Boalt...


--Is your school cut-throat or insanely competitive? Not at all, sometimes I wish it were more so so I could gauge how well I'm doing.

--Do people tear pages out of books in the library so you won't have access to them?  What is this, stone-age Harvard?

--Are students wiling to share notes with you if you miss class?  Of course

--Are students friendly?  Yeah

--Do you have genuine friends at the law school?  Only been here a few weeks, but met lots of people I like

--Any other things/experiences you may be willing to share.  Grading system is key for all this... 60% of people get the same grade, a P, so the competitive level is low.

[StevePirates]

I think the only sign of competitiveness I've seen is the above mentioned "only asking good questions in private" to deprive others of the answers.

[juliemccoy]

UF is not cut-throat. The people here are very social.

[Papa Bear]

I go to Minnesota, and my answers are:

-no. Not yet, anyway.
-haha! no
-yes
-yes
-yes

[loki13]

It has been my impression that the *general* rule of thumb is that the lower ranked the school, the more cutthroat the competition. This makes sense in a fashion. High achievers at low ranked schools are often on onerous scholarships, and the rewards for achievement at a low ranked school (if you want to do the Big/Mid Law track) are given to a much smaller portion of the class.

Again, this is a *general* rule. There are a few schools in the top50 that are known to be a little more competitive than most, and there are a few schools in the t4 that are laid back.