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Part 4 the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

One key group missing from the Conference was Deans.  I would have loved to hear from some Deans on how they would implement broad-based assessment when they are the same time trying to manage budgets, get their faculty to write more, and improve their school’s US News ranking.  As to the latter, does one gain anything at all in US News rankings by having a state of the art assessment regime?  There is a huge issue of aligning what should be the prime goal of law schools–legal education–with other institutional imperatives, some of which, like US News, are imposed from without.

Jeff Rensberger

Posted in ABA, Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Rankings, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

Part 3 the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

So, the Big Question is how does one perform a meaningful assessment in a large doctrinal class of, say, 90 students?  One of the most cogent remarks of the Conference was David Thompson’s observation that for assessment to penetrate deeply into law school classrooms, it must be made “dumb easy.”  Methods that work in small group settings do not easily transform to a larger group unless a huge investment is to be made in additional teaching resources.

Long before the ABA’s interest in assessment, I wondered, like many doctrinal professors, what exactly is the reason I get away with giving only a single final exam for a course, with no quizzes and no mid-terms.  The answer I came up with, which I think is sound, is this:  Law schools and students strike a deal.  Students forego the more regularized feedback and  assessment present in most educational settings in exchange for getting a full professor and no teaching assistants.  One obvious way to make assessment work in a large doctrinal class is to farm it out to TAs.  But that breaks the bargain traditionally struck.  So, other than through TAs, how do we do assess in large classes?  If this is to occur, it is going to either change the historic bargain or involve the magic genies of technology.   And there are some cost and time-effective means of assessing through technology such as on-line quizzes and audience response software.  But nothing is free.  If there is a cheap way to assess, it is probably less effective as a means of assessment than a costly and time-consuming one.

Jeff Rensberger

Posted in ABA, Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Rankings, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

Do We Need More Law Schools?

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

According to The National Jurist (September 2009), there are 10 new schools on the way (pp. 12-13). That doesn’t even count

  • the new campus the University of Idaho plans to open in Boise (mentioned in the article), or
  • the new public law school (approved earlier this year) the University of North Texas will open in Dallas in Fall 2010.

According to the ABA, there are now 199 provisionally or fully ABA-approved law schools offering JDs.  The following chart shows the growth in ABA-approved law schools since 1923, when the ABA began approving law schools.

ABA Law Schools by Year

Twenty years ago (1989), there were 174 ABA schools.  That’s 25 more law schools, or a growth of just over 14%.  Assuming that all 12 of the law-schools-in-formation make it to at least provisional ABA approval, the United States will have 211 law schools.

How much of this is demand driven?  According to the ABA, the number of JDs granted each year peaked in the 1996-1997 academic year, at 41,115, and then dropped for several years to a low of 37,910 (2000-2001).  The number of JDs did not recover to at least the 1996-1997 level until 2004-2005 (42, 672 JDs). During that period the number of law schools increased from 180 (1997) to 184 (2001) to 191 (2005).  That growth was not driven by demand .

 HistoricalJDsOne of the new law schools mentioned in the article is Louisiana College, who cites unmet demand in Louisiana.  Here’s the most recent information from the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools (2010 edition) on the 4 Louisian law schools, as well as Mississippi College (mentioned as the fall-back for would-be lawyers from Louisiana):

  • LSU:  499 offers on 1299 applications (38%); medians of 156 (LSAT) & 3.51 (GPA)
  • Loyola-NO:  799/1,611 (50%); 152 (LSAT) & 3.33 (GPA)
  • Southern:  376/1,114 (34%); 145 (LSAT) & 2.83 (GPA)
  • Tulane:  931/2,612 (36%); 162 (LSAT) * 3.59 (GPA)
  • Mississippi College:  621/1166 (53%); 150 (LSAT) & 3.22 (GPA)

The Bar-passage data for Mississippi College shows that 13 persons took the Louisiana Bar exam, out of 157 total persons taking a Bar exam for the first time.  More Mississippi College graduates from Louisiana might have taken the Bar exam first in Mississippi, but still intend to return to Louisiana.

In the article, Bill Henderson (Indiana, Bloomington) wonders whether there will be enough high-paying jobs to let an ever-increasing number of graduates pay off their college–and law school!–loans. 

Gary Rosin

Posted in ABA, Commentary, Law Schools | 7 Comments »

More on the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

The conference was weighted toward clinical and skills faculty in terms of the composition of the panels and the audience.  This is not meant as a criticism.  My take is that skills faculty have long been engaged in a richer and more meaningful assessment of students than have doctrinal faculty.  One way to characterize the increased emphasis on assessment in law school is that the clinicians (and the MacCrate and Carnegie reports) are ascendant.  So, it makes some sense that many presentations would give examples of assessment in a skills setting.  But if the mission is to change the practices of doctrinal faculty, more of them need to be at conferences like this and more of them need to be present to answer the Big Question, which is taken up in my next post.

Jeff Rensberger

Posted in ABA, Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

Notes on the Legal Education at the Crossroads, v. 3.0 Conference

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Last week, I attended the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference at Denver University.  A useful conference, with a lot of demonstrations.

There was much more coverage of student assessment than institutional assessment.  That is, most of the sessions focused on ways to assess student performance other than through the standard one-shot end of semester final exam.  The classic law school model is an example of summative assessment with no formative assessment.  The conference provided a useful counterweight to that model by discussing options for formative assessment (i.e., assessment that occurs while the learning process is going on).

But the other half of the equation is assessing on an institution-wide basis what the individual student assessments tell you about the learning that is or is not going on.  There were sessions devoted to the topic of institutional assessment, but–at least the ones I attended–ended up with a student assessment focus.

Jeff Rensberger

Posted in Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

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