Top Law Schools

.

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

Law School Grades Are Random

HTH

HTH.

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

Except for the guy who posted tonight about getting an A+ and then two Bs at a T-10

Seems the grades are really arbitrary. I bet there isn't much difference from an exam that got a B and an A, in regard to the answers.

But someone has to get a B, only a few A positions are available.

grades aren't really arbitrary. its just a convenient excuse. the perceived arbitrariness is what your professor values and is specifically looking for on the exam.

stillwater wrote:grades aren't really arbitrary. its just a convenient excuse. the perceived arbitrariness is what your professor values and is specifically looking for on the exam.

I'll agree with that. I wasn't creating an excuse, I don't need one. However, I was noting the "perceived" arbitrariness of LS exams.

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

uhh yes it does.

This is also just the nature of the curve. Maybe everyone else in the first class really screwed up and everyone in the second understood the material pretty well. It's not about how well you do but how you do relative to the rest of your class.

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

People don't get differing grades at any T14? Every person you know has the same letter grade for all their classes? Seriously one of the dumbest things I've seen posted in this forum.

nebula666 wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

People don't get differing grades at any T14? Every person you know has the same letter grade for all their classes? Seriously one of the dumbest things I've seen posted in this forum.

Come one, folks. Clearly a joke.

worldtraveler wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

uhh yes it does.

This is also just the nature of the curve. Maybe everyone else in the first class really screwed up and everyone in the second understood the material pretty well. It's not about how well you do but how you do relative to the rest of your class.

This seems unlikely.

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

sadday wrote:

worldtraveler wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

uhh yes it does.

This is also just the nature of the curve. Maybe everyone else in the first class really screwed up and everyone in the second understood the material pretty well. It's not about how well you do but how you do relative to the rest of your class.

This seems unlikely.

Why? Grading on a curve is all about how you do relative to the rest of your class.

A few days of cramming can teach you all you need for many subjects. Most 1L classes have like 20 pages of material to learn.

Law school exams yield seemingly arbitrary results because most people are very smart, go into them having worked hard and legitimately know the material (which really isn't rocket science).

Unlike a lot of college / high school exams, law school exams don't reliably reward hard work and knowledge of the material.

The results are a lot more like a sports match. Two major league baseball teams go against one another and maybe the better team will win 60-70% of the time, but both are full of world class athletes entirely dedicated to that goal.

Getting a B/B+ on a law school exam (at a good school) is, IMO, a lot like losing a professional sports match. It doesn't mean you're bad at sports or in any way ill-prepared, it just means somebody else was - for a very brief period of time when things were measured - better at sports.

If you're trying to get top grades that fact is understandably discouraging. Because of the curve, very few people can. The game was rigged from the start.

The only thing you have going for you is that most people are slow to pick up on just how different law school exams are from prior academic work. Professors look for very particular things, and while all smart/hard-working law students produce some amount of those things some amount of the time, if you really drill down you can do it more consistently than your peers because they won't be working towards the same goal.

If you treat your study as an exercise in learning how law school exams are graded, what gets points, and practice accumulating as many of them as possible on an exam, you're going to be doing something very different from your peers. If you take practice exams and then GRADE THEM - then do it with other people and GRADE THEM - then try to figure out exactly why and how they got different grades - you'll start to realize that there is a hell of a lot more method to the madness than most people think. The first time, two answers might look equally "good" but your check marks won't lie and you'll realize one actually got a dozen more points than the other. Pretty soon you'll see everything from an entirely different point of view, and you'll take the exams thinking like a law professor.

If you want As (every time) you have to focus on the act of getting As, and not the act of learning laws, going through the motions, devouring hornbooks, or being an obnoxious twat in class.

It depends on your particular curve, but from talking to professors / grading midterms as a TA, at my T14 there's a huge difference between an A and a B---getting one or the other is in no way arbitrary. On the other hand, what is pretty much arbitrary is the A- vs. B+ distinction. As with pretty much everything else in life, there's basically a normal distribution. The tails are obvious; it's the middle hump that's tough.

worldtraveler wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

uhh yes it does.

This is also just the nature of the curve. Maybe everyone else in the first class really screwed up and everyone in the second understood the material pretty well. It's not about how well you do but how you do relative to the rest of your class.

sadday wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

Except for the guy who posted tonight about getting an A+ and then two Bs at a T-10

nebula666 wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

sadday wrote:One class I did virtually nothing, crammed a few days before, got an A.
Another class I did all the things good law students do. B.
...I just don't get it. T30ish

There's your problem. This kind of thing doesn't happen at a T14.

People don't get differing grades at any T14? Every person you know has the same letter grade for all their classes? Seriously one of the dumbest things I've seen posted in this forum.

you people are stupid.

thesealocust wrote:Law school exams yield seemingly arbitrary results because most people are very smart, go into them having worked hard and legitimately know the material (which really isn't rocket science).

Unlike a lot of college / high school exams, law school exams don't reliably reward hard work and knowledge of the material.

The results are a lot more like a sports match. Two major league baseball teams go against one another and maybe the better team will win 60-70% of the time, but both are full of world class athletes entirely dedicated to that goal.

Getting a B/B+ on a law school exam (at a good school) is, IMO, a lot like losing a professional sports match. It doesn't mean you're bad at sports or in any way ill-prepared, it just means somebody else was - for a very brief period of time when things were measured - better at sports.

If you're trying to get top grades that fact is understandably discouraging. Because of the curve, very few people can. The game was rigged from the start.

The only thing you have going for you is that most people are slow to pick up on just how different law school exams are from prior academic work. Professors look for very particular things, and while all smart/hard-working law students produce some amount of those things some amount of the time, if you really drill down you can do it more consistently than your peers because they won't be working towards the same goal.

If you treat your study as an exercise in learning how law school exams are graded, what gets points, and practice accumulating as many of them as possible on an exam, you're going to be doing something very different from your peers. If you take practice exams and then GRADE THEM - then do it with other people and GRADE THEM - then try to figure out exactly why and how they got different grades - you'll start to realize that there is a hell of a lot more method to the madness than most people think. The first time, two answers might look equally "good" but your check marks won't lie and you'll realize one actually got a dozen more points than the other. Pretty soon you'll see everything from an entirely different point of view, and you'll take the exams thinking like a law professor.

If you want As (every time) you have to focus on the act of getting As, and not the act of learning laws, going through the motions, devouring hornbooks, or being an obnoxious twat in class.

This was a high quality post. Solid analogy.

thesealocust wrote:Law school exams yield seemingly arbitrary results because most people are very smart, go into them having worked hard and legitimately know the material (which really isn't rocket science).

Unlike a lot of college / high school exams, law school exams don't reliably reward hard work and knowledge of the material.

The results are a lot more like a sports match. Two major league baseball teams go against one another and maybe the better team will win 60-70% of the time, but both are full of world class athletes entirely dedicated to that goal.

Getting a B/B+ on a law school exam (at a good school) is, IMO, a lot like losing a professional sports match. It doesn't mean you're bad at sports or in any way ill-prepared, it just means somebody else was - for a very brief period of time when things were measured - better at sports.

If you're trying to get top grades that fact is understandably discouraging. Because of the curve, very few people can. The game was rigged from the start.

The only thing you have going for you is that most people are slow to pick up on just how different law school exams are from prior academic work. Professors look for very particular things, and while all smart/hard-working law students produce some amount of those things some amount of the time, if you really drill down you can do it more consistently than your peers because they won't be working towards the same goal.

If you treat your study as an exercise in learning how law school exams are graded, what gets points, and practice accumulating as many of them as possible on an exam, you're going to be doing something very different from your peers. If you take practice exams and then GRADE THEM - then do it with other people and GRADE THEM - then try to figure out exactly why and how they got different grades - you'll start to realize that there is a hell of a lot more method to the madness than most people think. The first time, two answers might look equally "good" but your check marks won't lie and you'll realize one actually got a dozen more points than the other. Pretty soon you'll see everything from an entirely different point of view, and you'll take the exams thinking like a law professor.

If you want As (every time) you have to focus on the act of getting As, and not the act of learning laws, going through the motions, devouring hornbooks, or being an obnoxious twat in class.

One of the best breakdowns I've seen in the four years I've been here. I spent a lot of time 1L year analyzing old exams and the model answers. Here's an anecdote: I noted that my con law professor placed a check mark next to every case name in the model answer. In fact, a simple sentence could garner like four check marks simply by citing multiple cases. The professor specifically told us that he would not reward fluff with no analysis. I will be the first to admit that I was completely lost in con law, but I wrote up a paragraph intro to each topic I talked about on the exam with a concise history/doctrinal explanation including as many case names as possible. My analysis was probably shit, but I got one of my highest grades of the year in that class purely by figuring out what he was awarding points for.

While most professors won't make available their marked up model exams, you can still divine what they are looking for. I style all of my answers to those of the model answers. You can tell what kind of heading styles they like, whether or not they like cases cited, how they prefer answers to be structured, etc. Let's face it, almost everyone knows the material. These are the things that are going to get you the A.

OutCold wrote:

thesealocust wrote:Law school exams yield seemingly arbitrary results because most people are very smart, go into them having worked hard and legitimately know the material (which really isn't rocket science).

Unlike a lot of college / high school exams, law school exams don't reliably reward hard work and knowledge of the material.

The results are a lot more like a sports match. Two major league baseball teams go against one another and maybe the better team will win 60-70% of the time, but both are full of world class athletes entirely dedicated to that goal.

Getting a B/B+ on a law school exam (at a good school) is, IMO, a lot like losing a professional sports match. It doesn't mean you're bad at sports or in any way ill-prepared, it just means somebody else was - for a very brief period of time when things were measured - better at sports.

If you're trying to get top grades that fact is understandably discouraging. Because of the curve, very few people can. The game was rigged from the start.

The only thing you have going for you is that most people are slow to pick up on just how different law school exams are from prior academic work. Professors look for very particular things, and while all smart/hard-working law students produce some amount of those things some amount of the time, if you really drill down you can do it more consistently than your peers because they won't be working towards the same goal.

If you treat your study as an exercise in learning how law school exams are graded, what gets points, and practice accumulating as many of them as possible on an exam, you're going to be doing something very different from your peers. If you take practice exams and then GRADE THEM - then do it with other people and GRADE THEM - then try to figure out exactly why and how they got different grades - you'll start to realize that there is a hell of a lot more method to the madness than most people think. The first time, two answers might look equally "good" but your check marks won't lie and you'll realize one actually got a dozen more points than the other. Pretty soon you'll see everything from an entirely different point of view, and you'll take the exams thinking like a law professor.

If you want As (every time) you have to focus on the act of getting As, and not the act of learning laws, going through the motions, devouring hornbooks, or being an obnoxious twat in class.

One of the best breakdowns I've seen in the four years I've been here. I spent a lot of time 1L year analyzing old exams and the model answers. Here's an anecdote: I noted that my con law professor placed a check mark next to every case name in the model answer. In fact, a simple sentence could garner like four check marks simply by citing multiple cases. The professor specifically told us that he would not reward fluff with no analysis. I will be the first to admit that I was completely lost in con law, but I wrote up a paragraph intro to each topic I talked about on the exam with a concise history/doctrinal explanation including as many case names as possible. My analysis was probably shit, but I got one of my highest grades of the year in that class purely by figuring out what he was awarding points for.

While most professors won't make available their marked up model exams, you can still divine what they are looking for. I style all of my answers to those of the model answers. You can tell what kind of heading styles they like, whether or not they like cases cited, how they prefer answers to be structured, etc. Let's face it, almost everyone knows the material. These are the things that are going to get you the A.

Yep, law school exams are a game. Skill and knowledge are important, but so too are luck and working the refs and rules as best you can. Sort of like the practice of law in a way.....

Every exam is a crap shoot.

3|ink wrote:Every exam is a crap shoot.

except for the ones i do well on

I don't think grades are arbitrary. People on here and in law school regularly say: figure out what your professor wants, and do exactly that. Professors reward radically different types of analysis, so if you try to use the same style of argumentation and writing on different exams, you'll get radically different results. I got a 3.4 in one class this semester and a 4.0 in another - I strongly believe it's because the 4.0 professor gave out model answers from past exams, which I pored over extensively and even built my outline off of. In contrast, the 3.4 professor did not give us anything to go off of, so I just wrote what *I* thought sounded like an excellent answer. Turns out what I as a 1L think is excellent is actually just mediocre - shocking!