I think an interesting point that this discussion has brought up is to what extent professors have a compelling reason to offer more feedback or change the structure of their courses away from the standard one exam at the end of the term format. I too had one professor last term, Avery Katz, who did a great job of both offering pre-exam feedback (he and the TA's gave us a few sample exam questions which they would look over and comment on if we took the time to write sample answers) and substantive commentary on our exams (each student recieved a scanned PDF version of their exam with his comments plus a long memo from him with the class grade breakdown, his sample answer and the top 3 student answers to each question). However, other than that I received no feedback from my professors last term, and my legal writing prof who promised to help me revise one of my memo's into a workable writing sample never got back to me and 6 months later still hasn't returned my memo. I think a large part of the problem is that these professors have no reason, no incentive, to offer substantive feedback or structure their courses in a way that might ease some of the stress of the final exam. If you think about it--and Eben's jokes and statements this term about how he is safe because he has tenure--as long as a prof does have tenure there is no real reason for them to go out of their way to change their courses, especially if it's a 1L course that they either don't really want to teach or have been teaching the same way for a long time now. And I think that it is this culture more than anything that needs to be challenged. Because if we want more professors to offer more feedback and change the system a bit, I am afraid it will have to come from younger professors; but, if they're too scared or too unwilling to break out of what seems to be the dominant system then nothing is going to happen.

For example, my Legal Practice Workshop this term was literally worse than useless. I was in the "special" section for students who had participated in a competitve moot court. The idea apparantly was that we had already written briefs and therefore needed to work on other skills, mainly our oral argument skills, earlier, in preparation for our competitions. OK, this is a sound idea but it was put into practice in the most boneheaded manner of all time. Our syllabus was identical to every other section for the first few weeks, so that by the time we started working on oral technique, myself and many other students had already had the first oral round for our competition. Now since all these teams were organized under the auspices of CLS the school therefore should have known when the competition rounds were (plus the TAs for the classes were the moot court team coaches, and the prof could have easily simply asked us to email him with our competition dates) and should have structured the course accordingly. More fundamentally though, one would hope that someone who is brought in to teach a section for students in competitive moot courts would recognize and plan his or her syllabus accordingly so that we could all benefit from what he was going to teach us before we actually competed. This hardly seems like brain surgery to me. If it was so important to the CLS administration that we do the memo-revising exercises that took up the first few weeks of our class, it doesn't seem to me unreasonable that our professor should have simply siwtched around the syllabus and given us that busy work at the end of the course (or given it to us during the 3-4 week hiatus that we had in the middle of the course). Instead, our professor blindly followed the dictates of the administration and I feel as though I got completely cheated out of what could have been a very useful and helpful course. To be fair, our prof was not a full time faculty member (though since he was brought in explicitly to teach our section I almost feel this makes his lack of backbone all the worse), and I am obviously bitter and riled up by this whole experience, but I think it is symbollic of larger problems here at CLS.

I think a large number of us took this class this term because we wanted not only to talk about how to avoid becoming "pre-packaged meat" for big law firms but also because we wanted something different; a breath of fresh air during our otherwise rigidly planned out 1L year. However, I think if things are really going to change at CLS we need more people who willing to break out of that rigidly defined system. I think that a lot of the solutions proposed here (mid terms, more feedback, etc) are all interesting, but I'm just afraid that they can't really be put into place without a bigger more high level mental shift in how our legal education is viewed. If a prof brought in to teach a specific skill set in LPW doesn't have the courage to stand up and say "this syllabus doesn't make sense given what you've asked me to do, I'm going to reorganize it but still keep in all the requirements you want me to include" to the administration (or perhaps doesn't even understand that such a stance is a possibility) then I don't think a lot of these other changes are possible either. Maybe I'm wrong, and sorry for the long rant, but I'd be curious to hear what other people think.

On a more general note, what did people think of LPW, because personally, I think one of the best ways that the 1L experience could be changed here would be a radical overhaul of the LPW system. I'm not sure how, but I just know it needs to be changed.

-- AlexLawrence - 02 Jun 2008