How much more challenging is law school compared to UG? Forum

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LS compared to UG?

No comparison. LS is 10x more challenging
64
38%
Much worse than UG
48
29%
Slightly worse than UG
33
20%
About the same
7
4%
LS is easier than UG
16
10%
 
Total votes: 168

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tome

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by tome » Sun Feb 27, 2011 8:10 pm

For those people who put LS is easier than UG, how is do you go to John Marshal or Cooley?

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by clone22 » Sun Feb 27, 2011 8:25 pm

Hmm, have I been doing undergrad all wrong? I did econ, and although I had no problems getting A's I actually went to class every day, read the material, and studied my ass off. If that led me to get a summa cum laude from a very decent ug (nyu), would similar amount of work result in similar placement in ls?

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Kabuo

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by Kabuo » Sun Feb 27, 2011 8:39 pm

clone22 wrote:Hmm, have I been doing undergrad all wrong? I did econ, and although I had no problems getting A's I actually went to class every day, read the material, and studied my ass off. If that led me to get a summa cum laude from a very decent ug (nyu), would similar amount of work result in similar placement in ls?
Seriously? This thread should be reduced to its poll.

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Other25BeforeYou

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by Other25BeforeYou » Sun Feb 27, 2011 9:00 pm

tome wrote:For those people who put LS is easier than UG, how is do you go to John Marshal or Cooley?
I'm not exactly certain what you're asking, but I'm pretty sure my answer is no.

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Moxie

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by Moxie » Sun Feb 27, 2011 9:50 pm

clone22 wrote:Hmm, have I been doing undergrad all wrong? I did econ, and although I had no problems getting A's I actually went to class every day, read the material, and studied my ass off. If that led me to get a summa cum laude from a very decent ug (nyu), would similar amount of work result in similar placement in ls?
Unlike UG, everyone in LS works their ass off. And you're competing with the very best and brightest (assuming you go to a TLS) The curve is the killer, not necessarily the material.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by AmericaninManchuria » Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:41 am

swc65 wrote:It is what you make it. It's really that simple. I know people below median who work their asses off. I know others who are in top 15% who go out four nights a week.

Sometimes I think that those who work 14 hours a day actually hurt themselves.
I totally agree with this. If you're not getting enough sleep or giving your brain anytime to process and recover, your performance will be hurt. If you're doing this days on end, a lot of other students that are getting a healthy amount of sleep are going to be able to accomplish what takes you about 8 hours in about only 5 hours.

When I was an undergrad. my challege was usually balancing due dates and keeping track of everything, since I often took a credit load over the max. that had to be signed off on..... I'm expecting the challenge of law school will be less flexibilty and endless reading.

And I think I'm a slow reader.. :oops: not like mentally 'slow' but I tend to spend a lot of time on each page... uh oh!

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straxen

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by straxen » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:01 am

Challenge is somewhat harder than UG, and somewhat more time-consuming, but there is a lot of hyperbole surrounding how hard 1L is except for maybe the last few weeks of each semester. This semester, I've somehow to move into a new house, manage my classes, do my job search, have a relationship and a one-hour each way commute, and still have plenty of free time. Having had a career before LS, this is just soooo much easier.

Now...if you want to talk about stress level, then yes 10x worse than UG. The fact that some people respond to that stress by working themselves to death (which honestly, doesn't seem to be correlated with grades) doesn't mean that it's a necessity.

Caveat: I'm an NYU 1L, maybe we're just a bunch of slackers. Also, thank god for ungraded LRW.

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prezidentv8

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by prezidentv8 » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:16 am

Sean Bateman wrote:more time consuming.
Not harder - the material is pretty easy - but it takes a shit ton more time these days.


Although to actually answer the question, I'd say about .3 GPA points worth.

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los blancos

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by los blancos » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:24 am

For me... (Econ UG at a top 20 and t14 lawl school)

Material is slightly easier (but that might've had something to do with the fact that I was caught in the unfortunate situation of being an Econ major who sucked at math in a very quantitative program and I find extracting black letter law from cases and applying to other fact patterns to be very easy).

1st semester of lawl school I worked 10x harder than I did in UG (mostly because I actually did nothing all of UG so I really still didn't do enough my first semester of law school... I started studying for CivPro 3 days before the exam). At my UG I was almost cum laude. I did ok my first semester of lawl skool, will probably do better this semester.



That said, graded LRW fucking blows. And while it definitely wouldn't change where I went to school, it's much, much worse than most 0Ls realize it will be.

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DoubleChecks

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by DoubleChecks » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:35 am

just me or does this vary a LOT by from person to person...

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los blancos

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by los blancos » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:52 am

DoubleChecks wrote:just me or does this vary a LOT by from person to person...
Well it naturally depends a lot on which law school you go to (and what your UG major is). If you pulled off a 3.9 at UChicago and somehow ended up at a TTT, you might just find that you can pull off a 3.9 there with similar/less effort. But this is incredibly rare I think... People with that kind of intelligence don't end up at TTTs.

Unless you were an engineer at CalTech or MIT (and even then), there's no doubt that the nature of law school curves and the competition you face makes it almost universally harder to replicate your GPA from UG. One of the first things they told us during orientation here was that many of us were going to get grades lower than we ever had before. And mathematically that has to be true because you take a bunch of kids whose entering GPAs are like a 3.8 median and curve them to 3.3 and that's what's going to happen.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by kalvano » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:59 am

Also, it doesn't matter if you study 14 hours a day if you can't calm down and focus on the exam. You only get one time to make a grade at a lot of schools. I know some very smart people who just flipped out on test day and missed an instruction or something.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by BioEBear2010 » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:59 am

The material isn't harder (in my case, 10x easier), but the competition is more fierce. It's also a lot more interesting than UG.

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DoubleChecks

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by DoubleChecks » Mon Feb 28, 2011 6:50 pm

While I agree that in general law school will be more challenging due to the curve (and the more competitive student body), I just meant this seems to really be dependent on a LOT of random factors, like the ones the posters above me mentioned lol. Short of having people give introspective mini-bios, a single general statement of "yeah law school in general is more challenging than UG for most people" should suffice haha.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by cornellbeez » Tue Mar 01, 2011 3:11 am

Material is easier in law school, but the competition is much tougher as well. My undergrad major was curved to a B-minus, so I didn't have a great GPA in my major. However, I took easier liberal arts classes and therefore had a decent cumulative GPA. So, my law school GPA is objectively worse than my undergrad GPA, and I have a worse rank. (Top 20 undergrad, science major, T-14 law school).
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Gatriel

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by Gatriel » Tue Mar 01, 2011 3:13 am

The work isn't all that challenging. What is different is everyone here cares, whereas back in UG 2/3rds of the class could care less, and they filled out the B's and C's. Making As back in the day was easy. Not you have to kill yourself, and good grades aren't guaranteed.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by weee » Tue Mar 01, 2011 3:37 am

I checked in at slightly worse than UG. I feel like there's a lot more volume of work, but it doesn't really compare with material difficulty for engineering. I definitely study for more hours in law school than I did in UG.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by Cupidity » Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:04 am

Law schools is a non-stop party.

Scary thing is, I'm serious.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by mr. jones1233 » Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:08 am

I had a technical undergrad, I think LS is a lot easier. The material is relatively easy and straightforward in law school, there is just a lot of that easy straightforward material to memorize. If you're good at memorization and inferential thinking, law school isn't too bad, just ask a third year!

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by CanadianWolf » Tue Mar 01, 2011 9:38 am

Students at certain undergraduate schools (e.g. Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, Cal-Tech, Northwestern, Princeton, Chicago,etc.) probably will find law school to be similiar in work & time demands as might some engineering & pre-med majors at other demanding undergraduate schools. The key difference, however, is the thought process which does not necessarily reward hard work as much as one is accustomed to in undergraduate studies. Many bright, life-long straight "A" students struggle during their first semester &/or first year of law school because the correct answers are not found in the study materials or may not exist and this can be frustrating to those used to hard work & regurgitation of the material on exams.

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by FalafelWaffle » Tue Mar 01, 2011 12:40 pm

I study a couple hours a week, big pushes around papers and finals. I don't see my personality changing, but I can't let my apathy about grades carry over. Anyone here good at making schedules and sticking to them? I could never. But I'm going to force myself. I have to...

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by FalafelWaffle » Tue Mar 01, 2011 12:45 pm

tome wrote:For those people who put LS is easier than UG, how is do you go to John Marshal or Cooley?
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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by FalafelWaffle » Tue Mar 01, 2011 12:48 pm

DoubleChecks wrote:a single general statement of "yeah law school in general is more challenging than UG for most people" should suffice haha.
That's what the poll's for haha

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by FalafelWaffle » Tue Mar 01, 2011 12:51 pm

Gatriel wrote:The work isn't all that challenging. What is different is everyone here cares, whereas back in UG 2/3rds of the class could care less, and they filled out the B's and C's. Making As back in the day was easy. Not you have to kill yourself, and good grades aren't guaranteed.
I always sort of figured that there are at least a handful of morons in every school who either have very well-connected families (i.e. daddy owns a firm or they have a family business fallback a la the Bluth family), and people who just want another 3 years of student discounts. I'm sure those people aren't nearly as prevalent at the T14s, but maybe it means you won't end up on the bottom unless...

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Re: How much more challenging is law school compared to UG?

Post by edcrane » Tue Mar 01, 2011 1:58 pm

I did comp sci/math/hard science in UG and find that the material is generally less challenging in LS. IMO, the most difficult LS material involves tandem application of 5-6 provisions from statutes/regs, and there the biggest challenge is just wrapping your head around the cumulative effect. Workload is about the same but is backloaded to a much greater degree than it was in UG. The biggest difference is just the increased stress in LS that is inevitably incident to mandatory curves in conjunction with employment that is contingent on a certain level of performance. For some people (like me), that stress changes the character of the experience.

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