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1Ls: LRW Floundering

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It may surprise first year students to know that the Legal Research and Writing course was a response to upper year student requests for a regimented, stand-alone course in this field. Most current first year students, at best, do not take the program seriously (for example, discussing – only half-jokingly – handing in the second revision of the memo after changing nothing more than the date); at worst, they consider it to be a waste of time and of school resources. In neither scenario do students seem to feel that they have learned anything of note.

On January 19, the SLS hosted a town hall discussing the concerns of first year students about this course. During the course of the town hall, there were some major concerns addressed about the delivery of the course, including concerns about timing, methodology, upper year students, and grading. Most of these concerns can be addressed through changes in the format of the course.

One of the main concerns was timing. As one student pointed out, it may be cute to dismiss these concerns by saying that students should ‘grow up’ or be more serious about school if they don’t like to come in Fridays for just one class, but this becomes more of a pressing issue when you realise how far away some students live, or their commitments to family. Commuting for an hour and a half to attend one course (which half the students in your class have chosen to forego, at any rate) is not cause for celebration among most students with long commutes. But the bigger problem that 1Ls had with this scenario was that the classes themselves were not seen as useful. For one thing, much of the material was delivered after the first exposure that students had to it in other classes, rendering the course repetitive. For another, a short hour spent watching a nervous grad student deliver steps on a slideshow was not seen to be as effective as immediate application of the relevant skills (which only occurred in some of the lab sessions, about which students were far more positive).

Another major concern was that of incentives. Students expressed the desire to be recognised for this extra course, whether through a citation on their transcripts, or through some grade credit applied to another course. The thought that students would do this for personal development was seen as too optimistic, since (1) few people advised them about the actual merits of learning legal research and writing; (2) by the time the memo assignments rolled around, many people felt overwhelmed by the other requirements of 1L to take a non-graded assignment seriously. However, upper-year and part time students stated the concern that if the course remained non-graded, then they should be allowed to take the course (which they are not currently allowed to do), since they are hardly competing with 1Ls for marks in a non-graded course.

One more contentious concern referred to the teaching quality of the course. Students repeatedly asked about the training that people received to teach the course, since the quality of instruction was generally thought to be poor. The request for grad students to receive better pedagogical training or for well-known professors to teach the LRW course was a recurrent theme.

The Legal Research and Writing course teaches important skills. Students should hardly be sent off to the workforce  without understanding the first thing about writing a memo. That being said, a course that students don’t take seriously, don’t attend, or find useless is not an effective way to train students. One potential solution that addressed most of these concerns was to frame the course as an intensive 2 or 3 day workshop at the beginning of the year where students would work in the computer labs to apply the skills as they learned them, and would have a memo assigned with a quick turnover time. Is this a quick learning curve for a student just entering law school? Yes. But it’s much better than the status quo if students find that they do, in fact, learn.

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