Law School Success: Grades, Scholarships and Learning Styles

There are two primary reasons that the odds are against the average 1L. The first is that there is only space at the top for 10% of your 1L class. Secondly, law school is designed so that there is only a short amount of time to master an insurmountable expanse of information and content.

The only way to put the odds of earning top grades squarely in your favor is to take control of time when you are in law school.

Let’s talk first about there being so few top grades. The odds of any student earning top grades in law school are fixed and slim because of the mandatory bell curve. In the average 1L class of 80 or more students, there are only a dozen or so A’s distributed along the curve. This includes A-minuses and A-pluses.

However, the odds of earning top grades are even slimmer if you are an underdog 1L like many of the students I work with. The law schools know this. This is why students with high LSAT scores and GPA’s are offered un-conditional scholarship money to attend. The school is betting that those students with un-conditional scholarships will perform better than those that are paying sticker price for tuition or those with GPA conditioned scholarships. Thus, because the underdog 1L is not expected to excel they must pay more tuition.

I work with many underdog 1L’s. I call them underdogs because based on lower LSAT scores and GPA’ they are not awarded scholarship money (or are awarded conditional scholarship dollars) and are expected to perform average or worse than their peers. Top performing students sometimes say that these students serve the purpose of “padding the curve”. While these students pay more for their legal education they are less likely to be hired by the best firms or have the opportunity to serve on prestigious boards such as law review or moot court. They are often first generation law school students and a large proportion are members of minority groups. Basically from their admission the odds are against them being as successful as certain of their peers.

Several law schools require these students to participate in programs before law school that are designed to level the playing field. These programs are mainly study tip seminars that offer traditional advice such as how to read a case, how to brief a case and when to begin outlining. Some law schools do this better than others and a few law schools, such as UC Hastings, go the extra mile for these underdog students and are to be commended.

In sum, these programs don’t change the fact that the school has spent money on the students it believes will be at the top of the class and unless you are one of them it would be a good idea to explore how you might defy the odds.

Let’s move now to the second prong; time and performance. If you think back to the LSAT, the thing that made it difficult was the time limits. Aside from exam strategies and tactics taught in LSAT prep programs, students that score high on the LSAT have the ability to think or reason at an incredibly fast pace.

Like the LSAT, law school rewards people that synthesize, reason and comprehend convoluted information faster than others. During your 1L year, you are given more information and tasks than there is reasonable time to accurately complete. On the LSAT the test stimuli are complicated and convoluted. In law school the cases are long, complicated and convoluted. The cases keep coming and the professors never slow down, rarely simplify the information, and most professors have a knack for never being straightforward. In law school, students will refer to this as “hiding the ball.” On the LSAT we call these tricky questions.

When taking the LSAT, the pressure of the clock meant there was no time to review your answers. Law school is much the same. Week after week more cases, more lecture and more assignments are piled on throughout the law school semester and at an increasing rate. There is no time for review and it is easy, if not inevitable, to fall behind.

Under these circumstances, the ability to synthesize, read and comprehend dense material and information faster than others would be a distinct competitive advantage. You would also be at an advantage if the information presented was consistent with your individual learning style.

Law school is an academic setting that disproportionately rewards a certain learning style over others. Many of my students are bright and capable. A fair amount of them learn best when they are given time to process voluminous information at a more reasonable pace. This way they actually have the time to adjust the material to their particular learning style.

Students who are more visual (spatial), social (interpersonal), aural (auditory) or physical (kinesthetic) are at a distinct disadvantage in law school. Of the seven learning styles the vast majority of the law school experience caters to the verbal (linguistic), logical (mathematical) and solitary (intrapersonal) learning styles.

A fast pace joined with an incongruent learning style can make an already difficult academic setting more challenging than it need be. My strategy is simple. I put my clients in a position where they are experiencing the fast pace of law school in slow motion. This way they learn more and perform better at a lower level of stress and anxiety.

Several weeks and sometimes a few months before the Fall Semester begins, I meet with my clients individually and begin teaching them the rules of law, explaining the rules in context of easy to understand examples and illustrating how the legal concepts we cover will be tested on their law school exams. Thus, by the time my clients start classes they have had a head start on the material. Soon we are wrapping up our outlines and sitting for practice exams. Meanwhile our peers have never looked at an exam and are months away from outlining.

A True Story

Last year a prospective 1L contacted me in May. We interviewed one another and thought we would make a good fit. He had been out of school for a decade or so and was concerned that without a head start he may fall behind during the Fall Semester. He had been admitted into a few tier 2 law schools but the area of practice that interest him would be better reached from law schools like UCLA or USC.

His first day of classes was the last week of August so there was plenty of time to prepare. Right away, I started teaching him the law of Torts, Contracts and Property. Taking my time to explain the concepts with as much detail as simplicity, in a month or so I assigned him his first practice exams.

By the time the semester started he knew quite a bit of law, had started outlining and already had some exam experience under his belt. A month into the semester we were taking full exams under time conditions and preparing for his first Tort mid-term. The result; he earned the highest grade on that midterm.

I’m not sure about you but I like those odds.

Chapter Summary

1. Underdog 1Ls have to compensate for their competitive disadvantages

2. The law school is betting that its scholarship recipients will be the top performers of their class because of a unique time correlation between the LSAT and law school

3. Students without a particular learning style are disadvantaged in law school

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