Law School Innovation

Will new grading systems really lead law schools away from traditional exams?

The National Law Journal has this piece reviewing the new grading systems that are becoming all the rage at elite law schools.  Here is how the piece begins:

Several leading law schools are retooling their grading policies, with some institutions making major revisions and others merely tweaking their systems. Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School, for example, are switching from the traditional grade and letter policies to pass/fail systems. At the same time, New York University School of Law now allows professors to give more A's. And some institutions, such as Columbia Law School, are reviewing their grading systems to see whether they need updating.

And here is a idea within the piece that really caught my attention:

Stanford Law Dean Larry Kramer said that it's too early to draw conclusions about the new system but that it seems to be working well.... "One, [the new system] conveys more accurate information to employers without diminishing student incentive to work; two, it reduces needless grading anxiety; and three, it encourages faculty to experiment more with evaluative things they do in their classes," Kramer said.  For example, the system allows faculty to use a combination of short-term papers with exams for evaluation, Kramer said.

I find the notion that new grading systems could foster a move away from the traditional law school exam both plausible and appealing.  Indeed, though I have been agnostic in my views about all these grading developments, I will get on the honors/pass/fail grading bandwagon if such a system proves to be a catalyst for moving law schools away from traditional in-class exams.

Posted by DAB

Some related LSI posts:

• What will be (and should be) the future of traditional law school grading?
• Is there an ideal grading system for law schools?
• What should we make of all the (not-always-so?) innovative grading changes?

Outcomes and hiring

I am a fan of Moneylaw, a blog which consistently parses out important issues relating to legal education.  Over the past few years, a theme has developed there:  That the staffing of law faculties is too often a haphazard, subjective, and (ultimately) unsuccessful venture. 

The name of the blog, of course, is a play on "moneyball," the term used to describe Oakland A's general manager Billy Bean's process of identifying successful baseball players.  Bean is famous for throwing out the standard statistics and instead looking to factors which most strongly correlate to a successful team.  Bean is so good at this that his team has been a winner with a relatively low payroll, a rare thing in modern sports. 

In baseball, the desired outcome is easy to define-- score more runs than the other team in a game.  The hard part is figuring out how to do that.  In legal education, though, it seems like we have the reverse-- we have a bitter debate over desired outcomes, but once an outcome is articulated most people know what it takes to get there (though it may be unattainable).

At a very basic level, the outcomes sought by upper-tier schools diverge from those articulated in recent reports and by some of the lower-tiered schools.  Under the first model, the desired outcome is to produce significant scholarship.  This is a rational goal, because it creates prestige, high rankings, and a solid student body.  We all know how to get there-- primarily by being there already.  It is possible to move into that place from the outside, but only with a lot of money and cherry-picking to hire prolific scholars who may also be great teachers (see UC-Irvine).

The MacCrate report, the Carnegie report, and many lower-tiered schools assert a different desired outcome.  They focus on teaching, bar passage rates, and positive relationships between professors and students.  The hiring done by some schools reflects this, as they are more likely to bring in former practitioners and those with significant people skills (who may or may not be good scholars).

Even with this dichotomy of outcomes, though, the baseball analogy can work.  That is, it would if the American and National leagues had fundamentally different desired outcomes in games.  For example, if the American league played traditional baseball and the National League played a cooperative form of home-run derby, we would quickly see each move towards hiring those best suited to that outcome as we have in legal education.  

It may be, of course, that this two-sphere world is a positive thing in many respects, such as in giving students very different options.   The fundamental problem beneath it all, though, is that one is valued more than the other in a rankings system which creates only one list rather than recognize this dichotomy.

Perhaps, then, it is time for U.S. News to consider two lists, one for schools that hire for scholarship, and one for schools that hire for teaching.  Schools could self-identify which they wanted to be a part of, and could change their category from year to year.  It would be a more honest, transparent, and useful ranking than what we see now, where we are essentially mixing two kinds of baseball in our standings.

-- Mark Osler     

Forget the laptop debate ... how about cellphones in the classroom?

This past sunday's New York Times brought this fascinating article about technology in the classroom, headlined "Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom."  Here is how the article starts:

The cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom.

At a conference this week in Washington called Mobile Learning 09, CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, plans to start making its case for the educational value of cellphones. It will present research — paid for by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones — that shows so-called smartphones can make students smarter.

Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.

The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students.

I wonder if any law prof has figured out how to take the digital teaching revolution to the cellphone.  I can imagine (and would generally endorse) students using their cellphones to keep up with my class blogs or to process e-mails outside the classroom, but I am not yet sure how I could effectively integrate the cellphone in my classroom teaching.  But if students get accustomed to using their cellphones for homework in grade school, law professors will eventually have to learn how to surf on this new digital wave.

Posted by DAB

Practitioner sabbaticals

This week, one of my colleagues began a six-month sabbatical to work as an Assistant District Attorney.  He’s an outstanding teacher and very popular with students, recently received tenure, and did not need this experience to improve his standing at the school.  Rather, the point seems to be simply to become an even better classroom professor.  

He teaches advocacy, and his reason for taking such a sabbatical is to deepen his understanding of what happens in the “real world” he talks about in class.  He was hired shortly after law school and a clerkship, so he did not previously have a chance to get this kind of experience.

Nonetheless, this kind of sabbatical seems very rare relative to sabbaticals for scholarship.  Perhaps, at least at those schools which focus on practitioner training, more of a balance would be a good thing. 

-- Mark Osler

New Kindle Being Unveiled Today

Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe, How Amazon's Kindle reader might be improved; LA Times, Amazon's new Kindle 2, please read me a story

ellen s podgor

"Wanted: Law School Deans -- Lots of Them"

The title of this post is the title of this intriguing article in The National Law Journal.  Here are some snippets:

Even in this economy, there seems to still be a demand for one high-paying job: law school dean. At least 27 law schools throughout the country are searching for new deans, and many are having a tough time filling the position.

Law schools from Harvard to the University of Arizona to Case Western to the University of Miami have all embarked on dean searches, and some are finding somewhat slim pickings, with the same applicants recycled for many of the jobs.

That's because law school deanships, once highly sought after, are now high-stress jobs, thanks in part to the economy. With fundraising plummeting, donors in short supply and state budgets being slashed, law school deans are finding themselves up to their necks in stress. Many have quit in the past year to go back to teaching, which still pays fairly well and has far fewer headaches....

The old model for finding a dean was to look internally at one's best professors, according to Susan Prager, executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools. That has been replaced in the past couple of decades by the model of hooking a dean or associate dean at a better law school, to give one's school cachet.  "You try to go up the pecking order," Jarvis said.

But in the past year or so, schools -- either unsatisfied with the crop of candidates or unable to persuade top choices to take the jobs -- appear to be reverting to the old model.

In addition to noting the ways in which a tough economy impacts law school hiring, this article led me to wonder whether any of the schools search for a dean might consider getting creative and innovative in their efforts. 

In this context, recall that Duke recently turned to a member of the federal judiciary to fill its top spot.  Might other schools have success convincing (supposedly underpaid) federal judges to come to the academy?  Or how about state judges?  Or how about all the lawyers leaving government service with the change of federal Administrations? 

Indeed, last I heard, former AG Alberto Gonzales was still looking for a job.  Particularly if a school looking to grab some headlines and generate some buzz, a search committee could do a lot worse than considering even controversial lawyers who are not among the usual dean suspects.  Just a thought.

Posted by DAB

The downturn

The economic downturn affects law schools in several conflicting ways.  It hurts state schools, because state funding for higher education of all kinds is cut.  We are already hearing about this happening at several law schools.  Private schools, in turn, become vulnerable because of their higher tuition as students become more cost-conscious.  On the other hand, applicant pools in general usually grow in hard times, because potential students have fewer other options.   Unfortunately, the preliminary evidence is that we may not be seeing this growth this time around.

Still, in most industries a downturn can be a time of innovation as businesses have to be smart and nimble to survive.  I hope that's true with law schools, but it may be hard to pull off.  In business, the innovations in transition tend to be towards efficiency and driven by management at the expense of labor.  In law schools, though, management is sometimes hard to distinguish from the labor, and the institution of tenure limits what a school can do with its labor force. 

Still, it could be that we are forced to sell ourselves better, to find new markets both for incoming students and our graduates, and to convince ourselves and others that the vocation of law is good, honest, and worthwhile. 

-- Mark Osler