Better 1L Grades: What Professors Won't Tell You

Most 1L’s think that, in exchange for their tuition and time, their professors are going to hold lecture and teach them the law. While this is a reasonable expectation it is not what actually happens.

In law school you must teach yourself the law. You will gain more from lectures if you use them as opportunities for reviewing old material instead of vehicles for learning new material. Your professors are opportunities to network. Their professional database in the legal community is far more valuable to you than their ability to explain the law. My clients maximize their relationships with professors because they approach them as mentoring colleagues and not merely as instructors.

There are three other practical reasons why expecting or relying on your professor to teach you the law is a bad idea. First, because law school professors cover more information at the end of the semester than at the beginning, waiting for the professor means you will be overwhelmed with material too close to exams.

At the beginning of the semester you have a lot more free time because there are fewer assignments. But as the semester advances the workload will become extremely taxing. For this reason, it is a good idea to take advantage of the slower pace of classes in the earlier part of the semester so that when things pick up you will be ahead of your peers.

A True Story

One semester I had a student enrolled in Property. Looking at his syllabus, I knew that mid-way through the semester his professor was going to cover a notoriously challenging property topic called the Rule Against Perpetuity. In my experience, this area is so difficult for students that property classes slow to a crawl. To help my client avoid this stressful period and since we were far ahead of his peers, I explained the area of law to him two weeks before the professor ever mentioned it. As anticipated, once the class reached the subject area they struggled with the content for weeks. My client and I were able to move on with the rest of the course and work on exams while the other students waited for the professor to teach them the Rule Against Perpetuity. The truth is, there was no reason to wait for the professor to cover the Rule Against Perpetuity. There are a plethora of supplements on this area of law that would have explained the rule far more simply and coherently. Waiting to learn a complicated area of law in a room of nearly one hundred frustrated people is a recipe for disaster and should be avoided at all costs.

The bottom line is that professors save the hardest and greatest amount of material for the last few weeks of class. The last thing you want is to be saddled with a lot of new and challenging material with little time left to take practice exams.

Second, law school professors tend not to be strong teachers because their employer (law schools) reward faculty with promotions and tenure based almost solely on research and publication. Thus, law school professors are not motivated to improve their teaching as much as they are to increase their publications. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but too few to mention. Law school professors are not required to earn teaching degrees. They were not hired for their teaching experience but rather for the volume and prestige of their academic scholarship. In fact, to improve their rankings, law schools recruit and seek out J.D.’s with the most and best publications. Prospective professors know that the best chance they have at the few coveted professorships at laws schools is to publish a lot and to publish in prominent law review journals. As a result, law school professors are not as dedicated to the craft of teaching as they are committed to their area of research and scholarship interest. This fact actually weighs in your favor. Soon you will be on the job market. Because your professors are scholars they carry a lot of weight in the legal community. Many students are not fully aware that their professors have a vast array of friends and colleagues who presently hold leading positions at important law firms, in the government sector and on the bench. Because most of your peers merely view the professor as their teacher, they are clueless to the strength of building a relationship with him or her as one professional to another. To professors’ credit, the law school has placed them under horrible teaching conditions. Recall the debate in childhood education that if teachers were compensated according to their students’ achievement test scores would improve. In law school, no matter how great the performance of the professor or student, only 10% of the class can have grades reflecting that performance. I can’t imagine that this fact encourages professors to sharpen their teaching skills. Another debate surrounding childhood education is the issue of over-crowded classrooms and its impact on the quality of instruction and learning. Again, law school professors find themselves in classrooms that double the number of students faced by an inner city schoolteacher. But with the cost of tuition to meet the high salaries law professors command, high class size serves an obvious financial interest for law schools. To be clear, law schools have a profit motive in keeping first year class sizes high in order to meet their costs. This reality presents challenges to students’ performance and success.

When we think of a strong instructor we imagine someone engaging and stimulating. This sort of instructor creates conditions wherein students understand the content and communicate clear expectations about what it takes to earn a high grade in the class. You can imagine how a gifted microbiology researcher would probably not be as clear a communicator as a 12th grade biology teacher. Researchers are often brilliant but their ability to explain things in simple terms is generally poor. Because law school professors are researchers by trade, they spend little time developing their teaching method. This would require they invest time and effort to develop techniques to teach students with different learning styles. Law school professors are more likely to attend alumni receptions and participate in speaking series than they are to attend a teaching workshop. A law school professor would be more successful in her career if she spent her time out of the classroom writing law review articles and publishing casebooks and supplements.

It is important to grasp early that your professors are not motivated to develop teaching skills but rather to advance their careers in other ways. My clients do not wait for their professors to teach them the law. In fact, we see it as a benefit that professors are often not strong instructors. There are a lot of bright people in any given law school class and everyone is lobbying for the top grades. If the professor explained the law and legal concepts as clear as crystal, the competition would be very stiff. Since most of the class is waiting for the eureka moment when the professor finally teaches them “what the law is” the perfect time to learn it is now, before the others wake up to the fact that the moment is never coming. It isn’t until the end of the semester that students realize that they are required to teach themselves the law. A few weeks before exams I always enjoy asking my students what their peers are doing. For me the question is rhetorical. I already know that most of their peers are knee-deep trying to catch up with casebook reading and writing ridiculously long outlines. I ask my students the question to highlight for them how they are in a better position primarily because they are building exam skills while everyone else is making up for the time they lost waiting for their professor to teach them.

Third, thinking that your professor is too unique to get a head start on the course is a big mistake. Unless you attend certain top tier law schools, your courses are bar exam driven. Thus, what they will test and how they will test is predictable. Many students are led to believe that reading ahead is risky because their professor may teach the material in a different way. This is a reasonable concern but let me explain why it is not as compelling as you may think.

Another True Story

One year I had a client in a 1L class in which the professor had a strong research background in health care law. In lecture the professor spent an exorbitant amount of time talking about health care components of Tort law. Students were sure that these health care issues would be a major part of the exam. My experience told me that the exam was more likely to test the traditional areas of Tort Law that are covered in nearly every 1L course. This was hard to sell to my client because the professor talked about health care topics so much in class. My client was under the mistaken belief that because the professor’s research interest was unique, that her exam would be unique as well. The exam turned out to be a textbook Tort law exam. A student could have aced the exam having discussed the standard issues of intentional torts and negligence and little, if any at all, about the health care issues. Sure, health care law was tested on the exam, but the proportion of points allocated to analysis on those issues was small.

The moral of that story is that although it is true that each professor is unique, unless you are at a law school that can afford not to worry about preparing its students for the bar, you are better off mastering the traditional areas of any given 1L course. These traditional areas will represent the bulk of the points allocated for the exam. Even if the professor’s research interest is tested, the amount of points allocated to that portion of the exam will be substantially outweighed by the amount allocated to the more traditional areas of law. The fact that each professor has a unique mark does not change the fact that most of the law taught in 1L courses is pretty standard across most law schools. This is especially true at law schools below the first tier. These law schools have a vested interest in keeping their bar passage rate as high as possible. The better their bar passage rate, the higher their ranking. For mid to low tier schools, ranking is their lifeline. When ranking is down alums close their wallets and fewer top applicants apply. Thus, 1L law school exams tend to cover the same material as the bar exam. As a result, their coverage is very predictable. This predictability coupled with my experience gives my clients an upper hand. I have the experience to look at a professor’s course syllabus and previous outline to gauge what material they will cover. I can also determine what aspects of the course can be learned without the professor versus the topics that are unique to a professor. Knowing this information means that we know what information we can learn ahead of class. This saves us time!

The pressure first-year professors are under to test and prepare students so that the law school’s bar passage rate improves is important to know as you strategize to win. I get my clients up to par on the rules of law their professors will cover in class and how those rules will be tested on the exam weeks and sometimes months before anyone has a chance to read the first case on the topics.

Accepting that your law school professor will not teach you the law is difficult. It goes against what we have come to expect of teachers and is unsettling because the material in law school is as foreign as it is dense. Most students do not accept this until it is too late to take steps to change their outcome.

Success in law school has a lot to do with how well you negotiate the expectations you have for your professors and how well you understand your professors’ role in your academic and professional life.

Article Summary 1) Smarter students develop relationships with their professors as professionals and not as instructors. 2) The best students are willing to teach themselves the law. 3) Class time is better used for reviewing than learning. 4) Professors that are not strong instructors are an advantage for students that teach themselves the law.