WUSL EIW Forum

[Grizz]

And yet, jcougar, you knew the game but still chose to play. Haven't read a good screed in a while; thanks.

[Anonymous User]

artful trolling mr. cougar

[Anonymous User]

It makes me happy when I hear about the success of others here (except for when I hear about a gunner douchebag or two). I don't really care if people already have offers yet or not...good for them if they do, and represent the school well when you graduate.

But the entire system makes no sense. There's no way you can convince me that arbitrary and subjective scores on a timed, 3-hour exam format that is a century old really says much about each individual's ability. Big firms themselves admit that grades have little predictive power over an associates' success at a firm. In the 100 years since the law school exam was developed, testing science has moved forward leaps and bounds. We've found out that tests where the main constraint is time (rather than the difficulty of the material) are some of the worst tests you can give. Tests with severe time constraints are extremely poor measures of knowledge, skill, ability, retention, and application. And the subjective nature of how you accumulate points on these tests (a nature that varies heavily depending on what professor you happen to have) makes them even worse. Why law schools and law firms continue to use and rely on outdated and obsolete testing methods is beyond me. You might as well have a school-wide timed crossword-puzzle-solving contest, and say whoever solves the crossword puzzles the fastest gets the only jobs out there.

The two things law school grades do give firms are plausible deniability and marketability. Even if grades don't mean anything, clients have the impression that they do, and firms don't really have a better way of sorting out who will be good from who won't, so they just use grades because they have no other options or methods to whittle down the list of 1,000 applicants they get for 3 positions. Plus, if someone from the top 10% screws up, you can be like, "we did our due diligence on this guy/gal...he/she got great grades."

That's not to say that it doesn't take talent and hard work to score highly, but I'm pretty sure that bad or average grades in law school are not proof of the reverse, either. And there's some really dumb people that end up in the top 10%. Some people have superior typing skills, some are just mentally more predisposed to answer in a fashion that impresses law school professors, some just luck out and happen to think like the professor, some got a fantastic outline from a 2L and just copied it down on their exam, and others are simply better at thinking under severe time constraints. When you can basically spot all the issues on an exam but get a median grade because you didn't rack up "analysis" points due to lack of words used in explaining the problem, it really signifies a problem. And when the professors themselves don't even believe in the grades they give, but are forced to due to the law school format, it's another good sign that the system is out of control.

In the real world you don't have only three hours to prepare a brief or answer a legal question. In fact, you are encouraged to be thorough and complete, and think things through overnight, and revise and edit things.

So if you're on law review, congratulations, and I hope you get a great job. I really do. You're no better or worse than your classmates, but I'd rather you get that job than someone from another school, because, after all, you're part of the WUSTL family. But if you brag about it, I'm not going to be impressed with your skill or think that you're a better person or really smarter than anyone else. You just happened to be one of those lucky people for whom law school exams come naturally.

The test is not over once 1L is complete. The real world is the next test, and plenty of people will get laid off or fired from Biglaw firms, some won't be able to hack the hours, and plenty of people will start their career in shitlaw and be awesome at it and later lateral in to biglaw firms with only a few years before they make partner. Some people who start out in shitlaw will become successful plaintiff's attorneys and get richer a lot quicker and with less work than you do with biglaw. You have much better chances if you're in the former group, but the attrition rate for biglaw is extremely high. If you can hack it for 3-4 years and live like a college student, maybe you can pay off that mountain of debt that the rest of us will have to live under for the next 30 years. Even if you do, maybe you'll marry some hot chick that only loves you for your money and prestige, and she'll cheat on you and divorce you in 5 years because you're never at home to give her attention and you're always get called in to do work on the weekends. Or maybe you'll marry someone awesome who can't take your lifestyle and divorces you anyway.

Getting a good job out of school is a significant step, and congrats to you if you can do it. But it's not a coronation. So if you act like it is (instead of acting like it's nothing more than a significant step), then you're a douchebag. And if you base your entire self-esteem on this one little step, you're probably going to have problems down the road. But if you can talk about your offer without acting like it's a coronation, than I'd love to hear about it.

*sigh*

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really? c'mon, son. you sound incredibly mad right now. shit is not attractive, b.

are you trying to solicit sympathy with that post? hoping some biglaw recruiter would stumble across that and PM you w/ a callback invite? protip: complaining about the rules will never get you anywhere in life. you seem to have a good grasp of what makes the law school world go 'round---instead of bitching about it, figure out how to make the system work for you.

[YourCaptain]

It makes me happy when I hear about the success of others here (except for when I hear about a gunner douchebag or two). I don't really care if people already have offers yet or not...good for them if they do, and represent the school well when you graduate.

But the entire system makes no sense. There's no way you can convince me that arbitrary and subjective scores on a timed, 3-hour exam format that is a century old really says much about each individual's ability. Big firms themselves admit that grades have little predictive power over an associates' success at a firm. In the 100 years since the law school exam was developed, testing science has moved forward leaps and bounds. We've found out that tests where the main constraint is time (rather than the difficulty of the material) are some of the worst tests you can give. Tests with severe time constraints are extremely poor measures of knowledge, skill, ability, retention, and application. And the subjective nature of how you accumulate points on these tests (a nature that varies heavily depending on what professor you happen to have) makes them even worse. Why law schools and law firms continue to use and rely on outdated and obsolete testing methods is beyond me. You might as well have a school-wide timed crossword-puzzle-solving contest, and say whoever solves the crossword puzzles the fastest gets the only jobs out there.

The two things law school grades do give firms are plausible deniability and marketability. Even if grades don't mean anything, clients have the impression that they do, and firms don't really have a better way of sorting out who will be good from who won't, so they just use grades because they have no other options or methods to whittle down the list of 1,000 applicants they get for 3 positions. Plus, if someone from the top 10% screws up, you can be like, "we did our due diligence on this guy/gal...he/she got great grades."

That's not to say that it doesn't take talent and hard work to score highly, but I'm pretty sure that bad or average grades in law school are not proof of the reverse, either. And there's some really dumb people that end up in the top 10%. Some people have superior typing skills, some are just mentally more predisposed to answer in a fashion that impresses law school professors, some just luck out and happen to think like the professor, some got a fantastic outline from a 2L and just copied it down on their exam, and others are simply better at thinking under severe time constraints. When you can basically spot all the issues on an exam but get a median grade because you didn't rack up "analysis" points due to lack of words used in explaining the problem, it really signifies a problem. And when the professors themselves don't even believe in the grades they give, but are forced to due to the law school format, it's another good sign that the system is out of control.

In the real world you don't have only three hours to prepare a brief or answer a legal question. In fact, you are encouraged to be thorough and complete, and think things through overnight, and revise and edit things.

So if you're on law review, congratulations, and I hope you get a great job. I really do. You're no better or worse than your classmates, but I'd rather you get that job than someone from another school, because, after all, you're part of the WUSTL family. But if you brag about it, I'm not going to be impressed with your skill or think that you're a better person or really smarter than anyone else. You just happened to be one of those lucky people for whom law school exams come naturally.

The test is not over once 1L is complete. The real world is the next test, and plenty of people will get laid off or fired from Biglaw firms, some won't be able to hack the hours, and plenty of people will start their career in shitlaw and be awesome at it and later lateral in to biglaw firms with only a few years before they make partner. Some people who start out in shitlaw will become successful plaintiff's attorneys and get richer a lot quicker and with less work than you do with biglaw. You have much better chances if you're in the former group, but the attrition rate for biglaw is extremely high. If you can hack it for 3-4 years and live like a college student, maybe you can pay off that mountain of debt that the rest of us will have to live under for the next 30 years. Even if you do, maybe you'll marry some hot chick that only loves you for your money and prestige, and she'll cheat on you and divorce you in 5 years because you're never at home to give her attention and you're always get called in to do work on the weekends. Or maybe you'll marry someone awesome who can't take your lifestyle and divorces you anyway.

Getting a good job out of school is a significant step, and congrats to you if you can do it. But it's not a coronation. So if you act like it is (instead of acting like it's nothing more than a significant step), then you're a douchebag. And if you base your entire self-esteem on this one little step, you're probably going to have problems down the road. But if you can talk about your offer without acting like it's a coronation, than I'd love to hear about it.

So in other words you're angry that some figured out how to play the game properly?

[JCougar]

I'm not mad. I just don't think it's a very effective system -- and most of it is a waste of time. Law school should be about one year of classes, each class should have you write a memo and/or brief related to the doctrine you're studying, and then a 2-year apprenticeship. You don't learn to be a better lawyer by cramming for a 3-hour typing race and getting zero feedback until it's all over.

I'm actually convinced that I will do fine no matter what happens. And I was serious when I said I'm glad for anyone that got offers. Just don't be a d-bag about it like this guy:

--LinkRemoved--

or this guy:

--LinkRemoved--

I haven't met anyone yet at WUSTL whose been a d-bag about their offers -- everyone's been very gracious and humble, which makes me glad I go here. So it's not intended for anyone to take it personally.

As for grades, I feel the worst about the answers I gave on the exams where I got my best grades: basically because I figured out how to BS the professor with sophistry. I don't think I should get a good grade for that, and I don't feel proud about those exams.

As for the realization that they don't mean much in the real world (except for the meaning biglaw hiring committees and judges give them), it's not just me -- biglaw firms themselves have been admitting grades only weakly correlate with performance:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... w_success/

People have every right to complain about the rules if they don't make sense. That's what our entire judicial system is based on. Laws and regulations are constantly being revised, refined, and updated because a lot of the old ones are stupid or don't work well in a changed society. Every good business has a sense of self-fallibility and humility, and changes and updates its own systems to improve on an ongoing basis. Every scientific field out there thrives on introspection and the concept of falsifiability. There isn't a single field out there that survives on the notion that "this is the way we do it, and even if that doesn't make sense, we're not going to change..and complainers are losers" except for the fields of legal academia and religion (or maybe the fictitious government in some Kafka novel...but those novels are meant to create horror at the concept of all-powerful arbitrariness). The archaic law school system: we better not change anything about that even when it's a facially absurd 100-year-old system. If you complain about that, you must be "mad" or something.

It would be less of an issue if there were actually jobs for people not in the top 20%. It would even be less of an issue if law schools didn't charge absurd tuition rates. But the current system is unsustainable. When close to a third of people at lower T14 schools are graduating without jobs (and close to half of the class at T25s), there's going to be a lot of really intelligent people with nothing to do with their life sitting around buried in debt. And they're going to figure out how to affect change.

[romothesavior]

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really? c'mon, son. you sound incredibly mad right now. shit is not attractive, b.

+1. Come on, that is so ridiculous. No doubt that a few socially awkward turdballs wound up in the top 10%, but I've yet to find one who wasn't pretty darn smart. Certainly they are smarter than me (or at the very least, harder working). I don't look at the top 10% and think "Man, I deserve that just as much as they do." No, I know better than that, and I think they all deserve it.

jcoug, you're entitled to your opinion about grades, I just think we've all heard and debated it plenty of times. It's beating a dead horse in the EIW thread.

[Anonymous User]

Anyone else with news on Bryan Cave?

Have only heard of two offers: One here and one at Illinois.

I'm assuming by the WUSTL you are referring to the St. Louis office?

I am still waiting on Chicago ... any info would be great.

Any other St. Louis office news?

[Aberzombie1892]

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really? c'mon, son. you sound incredibly mad right now. shit is not attractive, b.

+1. Come on, that is so ridiculous. No doubt that a few socially awkward turdballs wound up in the top 10%, but I've yet to find one who wasn't pretty darn smart. Certainly they are smarter than me (or at the very least, harder working). I don't look at the top 10% and think "Man, I deserve that just as much as they do." No, I know better than that, and I think they all deserve it.

jcoug, you're entitled to your opinion about grades, I just think we've all heard
and debated it plenty of times. It's beating a dead horse in the EIW thread.

I think what JCoug meant was that the top 10% aren't more intelligent than the general student body, and that is a sentiment that I can agree with. In fact, I largely agree with his (her?) long post about the topic. However, I feel as though complaining about it won't make a difference as legal employers hire from the "top" of the best schools both to justify concerns about due diligence and to sell resumes to clients. It's been that way forever, and likely won't change for decades to come. Legal employers know that in the real world there is pretty much no difference between the top 25% mark student and the 75% mark student - but legal employers are hiring based of the perception of "prestige." Prestige for legal employers generally means T14 or roughly latin honors (or better) at lesser schools, as those are the only methods law schools use to sort students.

[lolwat]

I think what JCoug meant was that the top 10% aren't more intelligent than the general student body, and that is a sentiment that I can agree with.

I think the top 10% overall probably are smarter. Sure, there are individual exceptions, but that's what they are--exceptions. Everyone I knew that was in the top 10% was pretty damn smart. Not everyone I knew that wasn’t in the top 10% was as smart, though there certainly were some that were. This isn’t to say that they’re dumb: everyone that can make it to a t20 law school is already pretty smart, so in general, there aren't many dumbasses. But there are still varying degrees of intelligence among an already highly-intelligent group of people.

As for jcoug:

And when the professors themselves don't even believe in the grades they give, but are forced to due to the law school format, it's another good sign that the system is out of control.

I think WUSTL professors are more unhappy with the forced curve than anything else.

In the real world you don't have only three hours to prepare a brief or answer a legal question. In fact, you are encouraged to be thorough and complete, and think things through overnight, and revise and edit things.

You know, I just got off an interview; something similar to this came up, and one of the interviewers said that the 3-hour law school exam does, in some cases, mirror a real world situation—broadly speaking, of course. Why do you think employers sometimes ask how well you perform under stress? Juggle multiple deadlines? Usually in the form of “have you ever been a situation where…”?

You don’t have all the time in the world to come up with a solution. You have deadlines to meet. There are situations where a client will call you in the morning and say that they need an answer by the afternoon. You need to balance your ability to be thorough and complete with your ability to get things done efficiently and quickly. Does a 3-hour exam do this? Perhaps not completely, but I think so to an extent.

As for grades, I feel the worst about the answers I gave on the exams where I got my best grades: basically because I figured out how to BS the professor with sophistry. I don't think I should get a good grade for that, and I don't feel proud about those exams.

You don’t think this is how you might win an argument before a judge sometimes?

[MrAnon]

I think WUSTL professors are more unhappy with the forced curve than anything else.

Based on their actions, WUSTL professors could not care less. They make a tidy salary on the system as it is set up. If it bothered them so much that people can't get decent jobs, or that the school has to fudge stats about the employment rate 9 months out, then I am sure they would all resign and go get jobs in law firms. Its one thing to say "I wish I could give you all A's; every exam was terrific" and its quite another to do it. Do you know how many classes before you any given professor has given that same speech to?

[IAFG]

*sigh*

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really?

There is no one in my section I would call "really dumb" or "dumb" or even "not smart" at any class rank. I don't go to WUSTL but it's hard for me to imagine that it's that different.

[blsingindisguise]

May top 10% isn't an accurate predictor of work success, but I can pretty much guarantee you bottom 10% would be an accurate predictor of work FAIL.

[traydeuce]

"As for grades, I feel the worst about the answers I gave on the exams where I got my best grades: basically because I figured out how to BS the professor with sophistry. I don't think I should get a good grade for that, and I don't feel proud about those exams."

then you fundamentally misunderstand the law, because the law IS sophistry. Every case you read is sophistry. Marbury v. Madison is sophistry. Palsgraf is the fucking quintessence of sophistry. the greater the sophist, the greater the lawyer. Maybe not realizing this is your problem.

[blsingindisguise]

I mean seriously of course law school grades aren't going to be a perfect predictor of success. Of course they're going to leave out some people who would do well and promote some people who won't. But law firms need some kind of metric, and grades happen to be one of the relatively better ones. They can't interview every student in every school (and even if they did, interviews have been shown to be flawed predictors too!). You want the world to recognize your unique specialness just because you are who you are? Sorry, ain't gonna happen. Fact remains that those kids with top grades at least did SOMETHING to outwardly demonstrate their qualifications -- what did you do?

[Kabuo]

*sigh*

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really?

There is no one in my section I would call "really dumb" or "dumb" or even "not smart" at any class rank. I don't go to WUSTL but it's hard for me to imagine that it's that different.

I feel like this about WUSTL except for maybe the bottom 5%. The vast majority of the class is plenty smart enough to be going on with.

[traydeuce]

*sigh*

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really?

There is no one in my section I would call "really dumb" or "dumb" or even "not smart" at any class rank. I don't go to WUSTL but it's hard for me to imagine that it's that different.

I feel like this about WUSTL except for maybe the bottom 5%. The vast majority of the class is plenty smart enough to be going on with.

Nonsense, there are daft t14 kids.

[JCougar]

Oh lord.

Nobody here is stupid. The exams aren't hard enough...thats the problem. You can basically spot every issue and still get a median grade because you didn't use enough words in your analysis.

The problem with law exams is that there's no theoretical basis for taking a group of people from a very tight subsection of the "ability" spectrum and forcing a curve on an exam that's easy enough for almost all of them to get. This forces professors to differentiate the exams using superficial criteria...because there has to be a curve no matter what, and if everyone basically gets the issues of substance, the only thing left to differentiate upon is suerfluous word generation.

No, I really don't think anyone is stupid here...when I made the comment, I had one gunner who transfered out in mind. He would say the stupidest and most irrelevant things in class and clearly was slow to get things, but he eventually did pretty well. Someone just took a tiny excerpt of a long rant I made, isolated it, took it too seriously, and blew it out of proportion.

[keg411]

No, I really don't think anyone is stupid here...when I made the comment, I had one gunner who transfered out in mind. He would say the stupidest and most irrelevant things in class and clearly was slow to get things, but he eventually did pretty well. Someone just took a tiny excerpt of a long rant I made, isolated it, took it too seriously, and blew it out of proportion.

U jelly. Tso jelly.

Seriously, Jcoug, I've read plenty of your posts on here and you always think that you did "the best" at something (whether it was getting a 180 on your LSAT when in reality you got a score in the 150's or whether it was in the "grades" thread first semester where you though you aced everything). Sometimes others are just better then you. You lost the law school game and knew what you were getting into. Suck it up, and stop whining about grades. You didn't get good ones and other people did. Making excuse after excuse just makes you seem petty and jealous.

[Oban]

Grades are grades and the curve is the curve. what is tragicomedy however is that once you strike out, here at woostl you will have kids on the edge of the top third(and some lepers in the top 10 percent) and kids at median and bottom ten percent all sitting in the same boat together, all of em shut out of biglawl/biggov/etc.

Grading system isn't the injustice going on in lawl school, it's the employment outcomes.

[TatteredDignity]

*sigh*

"there are some really dumb people who end up in the top 10%"? really?

There is no one in my section I would call "really dumb" or "dumb" or even "not smart" at any class rank. I don't go to WUSTL but it's hard for me to imagine that it's that different.

I feel like this about WUSTL except for maybe the bottom 5%. The vast majority of the class is plenty smart enough to be going on with.

Outed as having spent time in England.

[lolwat]

Wut, I thought this discussion died.

Based on their actions, WUSTL professors could not care less.

No idea where this brief rant came from. Guy said that WUSTL professors didn't believe in the grades they gave, and I simply responded saying that the only reason they don't always believe in them is because of the forced curve. Nothing to do with how much they care about students' employment prospects and what they've done about it; irrelevant to my post. Also regarding the curve, this "problem" only really applies to people more towards the median (or in the 33-66% range). People at the very top and very bottom of the curve earned it.

There is no one in my section I would call "really dumb" or "dumb" or even "not smart" at any class rank. I don't go to WUSTL but it's hard for me to imagine that it's that different.

This is generally true, but there are probably people in your section you would call "sort of smart," "smart," and "fucking genius" and that probably correlates somewhat with class rank, though not 100%.

You can basically spot every issue and still get a median grade because you didn't use enough words in your analysis.

This just means your analysis wasn’t up to par, not that you didn’t “use enough words.” Analysis is, hands down, the most important part of exams and well, almost everything else law related at that. Simply spotting the issues is never enough for ANYTHING. Spotting the issues will not be enough for you to pass the bar exam if you can’t analyze, because in fact, most of the time they already tell you what issues to write about.

[quadsixm]

This is generally true, but there are probably people in your section you would call "sort of smart," "smart," and "fucking genius" and that probably correlates somewhat with class rank, though not 100%.

I have to disagree with this for two reasons. First, your personal perception of how "smart" people are has absolutely no correlation to class rank. Second, "smart" is defined way too broadly. A neurosurgeon is undoubtedly "genius," yet that type of specialized knowledge may or may not have any correlation to class rank in law school.

[MrAnon]

I feel like if you've done your research then the fact that getting biglaw from WUSTL is difficult shouldn't come as a surprise. Neither should the fact that law school exams are graded on a somewhat arbitrary basis. I mean, when you heard that before, did you just disregard it? You played the lottery that each law school runs and you did not win.

[JCougar]

No, I really don't think anyone is stupid here...when I made the comment, I had one gunner who transfered out in mind. He would say the stupidest and most irrelevant things in class and clearly was slow to get things, but he eventually did pretty well. Someone just took a tiny excerpt of a long rant I made, isolated it, took it too seriously, and blew it out of proportion.

U jelly. Tso jelly.

Seriously, Jcoug, I've read plenty of your posts on here and you always think that you did "the best" at something (whether it was getting a 180 on your LSAT when in reality you got a score in the 150's or whether it was in the "grades" thread first semester where you though you aced everything). Sometimes others are just better then you. You lost the law school game and knew what you were getting into. Suck it up, and stop whining about grades. You didn't get good ones and other people did. Making excuse after excuse just makes you seem petty and jealous.

There's a lot wrong with this post from someone who's normally a pretty good poster.

I actually made that post to explain why I don't get jealous when people tell me about their offers. I like to hear about who succeeded. It doesn't really bother me that people ended up with better grades than me because I don't take grades personally. In fact, I don't think of them as a reflection on anyone's personal ability. My post explained why.

Second, I have no idea where you come up with this LSAT stuff. I eventually got my target score and couldn't have been happier. The first time I took it, I psyched myself out and ended up scoring 10 points lower than my PT average...which really isn't an all-that-uncommon experience. I never got even close to a 180 on a practice test, so where you get this idea that I said I should have gotten a 180 is beyond me. But I think your memory is faulty.

Third, I had no idea how I was going to do my first semester. No one knows. I felt good because I had learned the material cold, and went through the E&Es and found all those questions kind of easy. But the thread you were referring to was one started by a poster tongue-in-cheek where people were supposed to make douchey predictions about their grades, so I bit. I think a few people took posts in that thread way too seriously.

Fourth, the real point is that these things are not valid exams, and they do not predict work performance. Businesses that do their hiring based on assessments and tests have to show a correlation between test score and job performance, lest they be subject to liability for failure to hire people in a protected class. They may even be liable for failure to hire someone not in a protected class depending on where your business is and the situation. There's an entire industry built around developing valid tests that predict future work performance. If businesses used invalid tests such as law exams to do their hiring, they'd be getting hit with lawsuits left and right. I'm not really sure how law firms get around this law. I don't know enough about LLC vs. corporate rules in regard to hiring practices, nor do I know if, because they are tests administered by schools rather than the business itself, they can avoid disparate impact liability under Title VII. But it's not even the legal part that's the issue. The issue is that if you're using an invalid metric for hiring purposes, that means you're ignoring other, more valuable metrics, and you're not actually hiring the best lawyers you could be hiring. So if you're really trying to hire and develop strong attorneys, grade shallowness hurts the firms themselves. Of course, this isn't biglaw's goal in the first place, so maybe that's why they don't care.

Similarly, there's no testing theory that justifies scoring these exams on a bell curve when the population sub-sample you are testing is not distributed on a normal bell curve ability-wise. The entire idea of these exams is based on a fantasy some law professors came up with 50 years ago simply to create the illusion of elitism, and to justify limiting the supply of "top" business lawyers. The bottom line is that roughly 80% of the students that end up attending T1 schools have the ability to do the kind of work a Biglaw associate does. But by inventing the curve, it creates a false illusion of elitism and artificially limits the supply of people who can do the work, making it easier for the people who do do the work to raise their rates due to lack of competition, and making it plausible for Biglaw firms to claim that their rates are justifiable for having the "best of the best." But biglaw associate work is mostly busywork, and doesn't really require elite intellect.

Lastly, I resent the fact that you think I "lost the law school game." You have no idea what my employment situation is, what I have planned for my summer, or what I will be doing for my career. You really have no idea. Perhaps I got a callback and an offer just last week. Even if not, the "game" is far from over. I'm not out of contention for biglaw. I didn't do poorly. I just felt like my grades were incredibly random, and I know for a fact that this process is fairly stupid. It's not even good for the people that succeed. They waste their time learning how to take a law school exam when they should be learning how to be a lawyer.

And even if I had a V10 offer in hand, I'd still stick by this argument. You don't have to be one who "lost the game" to criticize this crazy system. Most of the people who did really well that I know were ones that realized it was BS early on and adapted. For whatever reason, I found it hard to adapt.

I've met a lot of incredible people in this industry in the past few weeks through networking. There's plenty of "C" law students that end up making it big. There's plenty of "A" students that quit before their first year is over. These two Biglaw partners last night were just joking that already 3 associates from their incoming class had nervous breakdowns due to the stress/workload (it was a huge NYC firm). And all these people obviously killed it in law school. 78% of people who enter Biglaw are gone by year 5. Are all their debts paid off by then? Who knows these days.

There's plenty of people out there dejected and discouraged by this whole experience. But they shouldn't be, because the real world is the real test. Law school doesn't exist in the real world: it's an academic bubble ruled by blind tradition and phony notions of prestige. But, as any good investor knows, prestige is not real value. It's a market inefficiency that causes some people to behave irrationally and pay a higher price than they should. It's not allure to prestige, but an eye for value and the true nature of things that makes one most successful.

[TatteredDignity]

So, how are firms supposed to assess from your experience/personality/interviewing whether you're intelligent? Do you want them to administer their own assessment tests? Srs question.