Top Law Schools

How often do a student fail a law school exam? I took my Crim and K, tomorrow is Prop. I really felt like I got C is the previous two and will fail Prop.

Hahaha, you won't fail. It does kind of depend on whether your school does a B Median or B Mean curve though. Most law school profs, unless you write a 3 sentence essay answer that addresses no issues will not give you less than a C/C-. You are being to hard on yourself. You are a 1L (as am I) you aren't supposed to know everything, they know that!

Most law schools will not "fail" you as long as you show up to the exam and give a reasonbaly good effort. At my law school (I graduated in '06), students have to really try hard to fail a class (come to think of it, none of my classmates failed a class that I know of). Many students feel exactly the way you do after their first exams. Many think they failed a course or two, but almost nobody actually fails. Hang in there.

T1 = no one generally fails. Though 1-2 people per section may get a D or F since there's always someone who does something whack.

TTT = more people fail, sometimes up to half the class due to their brutal curve.

tamtam wrote:How often do a student fail a law school exam? I took my Crim and K, tomorrow is Prop. I really felt like I got C is the previous two and will fail Prop.

I'm a 1L, so I can't say this for sure, but the curve sounds like it's insane from what 2Ls and 3Ls suggest and our "mock" exam question we had in contract. A 60% was an "A-" on our mock final (I know because I ended up falling at that line on the mock final). I suspect grades would be slightly higher during the actual final considering more people would've made more of an effort to go to the secondary sources, etc., but I still can't imagine they'd be considerably higher (e.g. 90% becoming a C).

Our civ-pro professor told the us on the last day of class that if we had not been cramming all semester that we should "go to the dean and tell him that our mother died, just make something up, take a semester off if you have to and sort your life out", because he would fail us. ...he said he only fails a few kids each year, but I still thought it was a bad-ass comment...

bobjr wrote:Our civ-pro professor told the us on the last day of class that if we had not been cramming all semester that we should "go to the dean and tell him that our mother died, just make something up, take a semester off if you have to and sort your life out", because he would fail us. ...he said he only fails a few kids each year, but I still thought it was a bad-ass comment...

Wow. He sounds like a total jackass.

Yeah, he is a bit Kingsfieldian. He'll pick one student at random at the start of the class (~120 kids) and grill them for an hour straight. He tore into one kid (who had obviously done the reading) one morning because he got tongue tied in the first sentence of an answer when called on (told him he didn't belong in law school, was wasting everyone's money, etc...). His tests are also a bit absurd-- they are comprised of extremely complicated and ambiguous multiple choice questions, which you can just barely finish in the allotted time (ambiguous because he does not supply answer keys to past years' exams, so you can recognize questions similar to those he's used in the past, but are never sure of the answer), and a multi-part essay with a character limit of 2500-3500. On the essay he frequently presents a topic that was never discussed in class and expects you to perfectly analogize to something tangentially related that was discussed. If you analyze the wrong issue or don't bring up the correct case, as he explains, you will receive zero credit on that portion of the essay (an essay has maybe two or three 'portions'). The essay limit is so short that you cannot cover all of your bases; you must simply pick the point you think is most relevant and hope its the one he was thinking of. Overall his strategy in making his exam seems to be to incorporate a high level of unavoidable chance (though he would never admit it).

man... which law school....

bobjr wrote:Yeah, he is a bit Kingsfieldian. He'll pick one student at random at the start of the class (~120 kids) and grill them for an hour straight. He tore into one kid (who had obviously done the reading) one morning because he got tongue tied in the first sentence of an answer when called on (told him he didn't belong in law school, was wasting everyone's money, etc...). His tests are also a bit absurd-- they are comprised of extremely complicated and ambiguous multiple choice questions, which you can just barely finish in the allotted time (ambiguous because he does not supply answer keys to past years' exams, so you can recognize questions similar to those he's used in the past, but are never sure of the answer), and a multi-part essay with a character limit of 2500-3500. On the essay he frequently presents a topic that was never discussed in class and expects you to perfectly analogize to something tangentially related that was discussed. If you analyze the wrong issue or don't bring up the correct case, as he explains, you will receive zero credit on that portion of the essay (an essay has maybe two or three 'portions'). The essay limit is so short that you cannot cover all of your bases; you must simply pick the point you think is most relevant and hope its the one he was thinking of. Overall his strategy in making his exam seems to be to incorporate a high level of unavoidable chance (though he would never admit it).

awesome

tamtam wrote:man... which law school....

gulc. and the sick thing is that class was actually really fun once you found out he wasn't going to call on you that day. he preyed on me the first week, so i was able to kick back and enjoy watching the feeding for the rest of the semester.

yeah, that is sick

we weren't without compassion, though. when someone was being beat-up on, everyone would gchat answers to the person. the prof also like to tell the class a short funny story of joke after calling on someone, and explain that it was meant to be a delay to let the person he had just called on gather their notes/prepare themselves... sort of like giving a fox a sporting head start before you unleash the hounds

fail grammar

sonpleaseiamthelaw wrote:fail grammar

+1

oh well

look, it's the Reno 911 of grammar police^

I just got my first grade back today and the the grade curve is fucking nutz! The distribution is below and it was out of 150. Basically if you had at least a 43% you passed with a C- (no one fell below that), but the median being 60% is pretty outrageous.

A+ 135-150
A 112-134
A- 105-111
B+ 100-104
B 91-99
B- 90
C+ 86-89
C 71-85
C- 65-70
D+ 60-64
D 50-59
F 0-49

XxSpyKEx wrote:the median being 60% is pretty outrageous.

And pretty typical. Without the crippling point scale they wouldn't have enough tailroom for the upper end of the curve.

bobjr wrote:Yeah, he is a bit Kingsfieldian. He'll pick one student at random at the start of the class (~120 kids) and grill them for an hour straight. He tore into one kid (who had obviously done the reading) one morning because he got tongue tied in the first sentence of an answer when called on (told him he didn't belong in law school, was wasting everyone's money, etc...).

Did no one grab their balls and tell him to suck on their big fat dong? Seems like it woulda been pretty hard to hold back with this guy.