Archive for the ‘Scholarship’ Category

Law Review Survey

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Professors Lucy S. McGough (LSU), James W. Bowers (LSU) and Richard A. Wise (North Dakota, Psychology) are interested in thoughts on student-rum law reviews:

For the last several decades, there has been much controversy and discussion about how well the current system of student run law reviews and journals meet the needs of legal scholars, the legal profession, and its student members and how they can be improved. Despite the significance of this controversy, no one has determined the legal community’s opinions about them.

The purpose of the present survey is to assess:

     (1) What law professors, attorneys, judges, and law review editors think about the current system of student run law reviews and journals;

     (2) Whether reforms are needed; and

     (3) If reforms are needed, what they should be.

The present survey is completely anonymous and confidential and only takes about 15-20 minutes to complete. The results of the survey will be reported in a law review article. A link for the survey is enclosed below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SVJXVNW

We are asking for your help with this important survey because the success of any survey depends in large part on the number of people who complete the survey. We would very much appreciate your answering the survey and then forwarding it to other law professors who may be interested in completing it!

Posted in Scholarship | No Comments »

Assessing Assessment

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Andrea A. Curcio (Georgia State) has a new article, Assessing Differently and Using Empirical Studies to see if it Makes a Difference:  Can Law Schools do it Better?, 27 QUINNIPIAC L. REV. 899 (2009) (SSRN).  Curcio argues that law schools–and law professors–need to start thinking not only about how we assess students, but also about how we assess our assessments:

This Article explores alternative law school assessment methods and suggests ways to engage in empirical study of alternative and existing assessments. In Part II, the Article provides some concrete suggestions for both incremental and larger changes to doctrinal class assessment practices with an eye toward developing assessments that begin to desegregate legal analysis, practical skills, and professional identity. What is not explored explicitly, but what is implicit throughout, is that, because professors should not assess what they do not teach, examining and changing assessment methods necessarily involves reflection about teaching methodology and coverage.

The Article then moves from a discussion of changing teaching and assessment practices to a discussion of studying the impact of those changes. Because empirical studies can be a persuasive tool in laying the groundwork necessary to develop institutional support for a change in assessment practices, Part III seeks to de-mystify the empirical study process. Written for those without a social science background, it briefly discusses basic issues in study design, methodology, implementation, and interpretation, providing an overview of how to develop and design an empirical research study. Part IV suggests some potential empirical research assessment studies that can be performed on both alternative and existing law school assessment methods. Finally, the Article concludes by arguing that if law professors give their teaching and assessment work the same scholarly scrutiny given to other research interests, they may discover ways to help students become more effective lawyers, lessen student disengagement and create the potential for a more diverse bench and bar.

Id. at 903.

To borrow from Curtis Mayfield, “[p]eople get ready, there’s a train a comin'”.  As Curcio suggests, we’re going to need more than faith.

posted by Gary Rosin

Posted in Assessment, Empirical Studies, Law Schools, Scholarship, Student Learning, Teaching | 1 Comment »

Journal Reputation and Moving Up

Friday, August 28th, 2009

In Signaling Value of Law Reviews, I noted an article by Al Brophy (North Carolina) cautioning that scholarship should be judged on its own merits.  Paul Caron notes an empirical study of “the theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect),” that controls for article quality.  In The Impact Factor’s Matthew Effect:  A Natural Experiment in Bibliometrics, Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras conclude

The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.

So, it’s not just a matter of the quality of the paper, but also of its placement.  It follows that an author’s academic reputation is also enhanced by placement.  Thus, the urge to “trade-up” in placement of articles.  Presumably, a law school’s peer reputation follows (with a lag?) that of its faculty.  Earlier, I discussed Jeff Lipshaw’s (Suffolk) thoughts on the penchant of ambitious young professors to “move up the food chain to a law school with a higher ranking.

Given the strong influence of peer reputation in the US News law-school rankings, should lower-tier law-schools try to move up in the rankings by using pay-for-placement bonuses to young professors that might be just moving through?  Or does their ability to do that–or their earlier association with a school–also enhance the peer reputation of that school?

Gary Rosin

Posted in Law Professors, Law Schools, Rankings, Scholarship | No Comments »

The Signaling Value of Law Reviews

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I haven’t looked at this yet, but this new article looks interesting:  Alfred L. Brophy, The Signaling Value of Law Reviews:  An Exploration of Citations and Prestige,  36 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 229-243 (2009)(SSRN).  His conclusion is that

the results here suggest that we should we wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should also be wary of judgments about quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Gary Rosin

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Posted in Law Schools, Scholarship | 1 Comment »

Assessing Student Learning: A Report from the Eastern Front

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Educating Lawyers:  Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007) started it (again).  Then the ABA adopted minimum Bar passage standards for law schools (Interpretation 301-6 of the Standards for Law School Approval).  Then the ABA’s Standards Review Commmittee appointed a Special Committee on Outcome Measures (Report and Comments).  The upshot is that law schools are going to be paying much more attention to assessing student learning.  Law schools are latecomers at this.  You might even say we’re a back-water.  The rest of the American academy started a while ago, not to mention grades K-12 and No Child Left Behind.

On the Brainstorm blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, Sara Goldrick-Rab asks “Is Our Student’s Learning?”  She discusses a recent presentation, at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, on the CLA Longitudinal Study.  According to Goldrick-Rab, one of the findings is that

[S]tudents who start behind tend to stay behind; put another way those inequalities at the starting gate are consistent.

Certainly, that’s what my analysis of law-school first-time Bar-passage rates shows:  Law schools whose students have lower LSAT scores have lower Bar passage rates.  See Unpacking the Bar:  Of Cut Scores and Competence, 32 J. Legal Prof. 67 (2008) (submission draft).

For law schools with a greater number of at-risk students, the question is whether better instructional practices and assessment, as well as academic support, can improve student learning.

Gary Rosin

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Posted in Rankings, Scholarship, Student Learning | 1 Comment »

Rankings: Peer Assessments and Test Scores

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece, More Questions on Rankings, on an article by Kyle Sweitzer (Michigan State) & J. Fredericks Volkwein (Penn State), Prestige Among Graduate and Professional Schools: Comparing the U.S. News’ Graduate School Reputation Ratings Between Disciplines (forthcoming in Research in Higher Education).  The Inside Higher Ed notes that the article concludes that

Peer reviewers also seem to place a high emphasis on standardized test scores, with the average score significant for all of the graduate categories except education. Test scores also appear to have the greatest influence on the reputation (as measured by the survey) in law and medical schools.

Update:  Over on TaxProf, Paul Caron discusses the article in Peer Reputation:  Size Matters, 

Gary Rosin

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Posted in Rankings, Scholarship | No Comments »