Category: Excel in Law School

Taking a Future Bar Exam? Learn the Requirements in Your Jurisdiction!

You will find reliable information in The Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements. According to the NCBE, “The Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements, published in collaboration with the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, provides information on bar admission requirements in all US jurisdictions, including a directory of state bar admission agencies.”

Start with the Comprehensive Guide, then go on to study the website of the bar examiners in the jurisdiction where you plan to take the bar .

Don’t forget to Breathe!

How tense are you right now? How much learning is blocked from coming into and staying in your brain because of nerves.

My constant refrain that I ask bar takers and other students getting ready for exam to tell yourselves is: “Turn Panic into Power and not Paralysis.” That power phrase appears in my books and articles and in most every talk I give to students preparing for high stakes exams.

There are many steps for turning panic into power. Step one is always to breathe. We’ll talk about next steps in future blog posts.

July Bar Takers: Five Prompts for Bar Success Planning, Starting Now

If you are taking the July bar exam, start planning now. Here are five prompts to get you started:

1. Where will you live after graduation?

2. Do you have a place to study that is conducive to learning?

3. Have you lined up all the bar review resources you will need?

4. Have you let your family and friends know you’ll be gone in June and July – and, have you taken care of all summer obligations so that you can either handle them by May or put them off until August?

And, last but not least, for now,

5. Do you have enough money saved to live for two months after graduation without working?

#barexam, #barexamtips, #barsuccess, #lawschool, #lawstudent

Ten tips to manage procrastination

Many students share that as midterms and finals approach, and during bar prep, they find themselves unusually eager to clean their homes, review and delete old emails, clip their toenails. You get the idea – anything other than studying!

Here are tips if this is your situation:

  1. Know that procrastination is normal. Lose the self-criticism.
  2. See some procrastinating as a positive. Sometimes, it does serve a useful purpose – helping re-charge your batteries so that you are all-in when you are studying.
  3. If your procrastination is paralyzing, rather than positive, seek help from reliable, expert resources.
  4. Think of an academic goal as a series of finite projects. It is more tempting to avoid something that feels like a huge challenge. Identifying tasks as doable parts of a project makes them more approachable.
  5. Once you identify the various tasks, ask yourself if any of them feel overwhelming, and see if you can get some help with those pieces of the puzzle.
  6. List what you tend to do when you procrastinate and schedule specific, limited time slots for those things. Don’t make them guilty pleasures. Make them a controlled part of your day. For example, if you procrastinate with social media, you may find yourself losing many hours. If you know that every day, you have social media “office hours,” you will be less apt to use that as an escape.
  7. Study first, then take your time “off.”
  8. Adopt a routine. Being on a schedule will help your body and brain “accept” that you just do particular tasks at certain times. You just do.
  9. Talk to yourself about how good you feel when you accomplish what you set out to do. And, if it’s helpful, remind yourself how icky it feels when you don’t. Simple example: many people have a habit of never going to sleep with dirty dishes in the sink. No matter how tired they are, they just don’t procrastinate on that one. Why? They find it pleasant to wake to a clean sink and very unpleasant to wake to dirt. They also realize that the task gets more difficult the longer food sticks to dishes. And, they know that a sink for of dirty dishes attracts bugs.
  10. Articulate why your big goals are important and valuable. And give yourself props for all the hard work you are doing.

#studysuccess, #academicsuccess, #lawschool, #lawstudent, #ASP, #barsuccess

Happy New Year

To all, may the year bring hope, happiness, and health!

To upcoming bar takers, and all facing great challenges, may you embrace that which is difficult knowing that your effort is worthwhile, your courage is great, and your persistence will be rewarded.

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For 1L Students

#Contracts #LawStudents #1L
Step-by-Step Guide to Contracts -an interactive workbook designed to effectively prepare students to pass exams. The most heavily tested legal rules are presented in a format that mirrors the way they arise as issues in typical testing fact patterns. Rule statements are set out in easy-to-memorize statements, with a breakdown of the element components and logical steps to take to apply new facts to each legal element. Fluency with the legal terminology is also essential to exam success, so this Step-by-Step Guide includes fill-in-the-blank spaces to help you learn and memorize definitions of key terms as they are introduced, and a glossary of selected terms at the end for further reference. In addition to learning the law and memorizing key rules and terms, success in law school also requires the hard work of deep learning, engaging with problems to test your own knowledge, and working toward gaining a strong command of all testable topics. To that end, this Guide contains short-answer Test Yourself questions. Working through these questions and then reading the answers and explanations to determine where your understanding is clear and where you must do additional work will help you master the skill of applying the relevant rules to new and different fact patterns. In addition to the short-answer questions, this Guide also includes numerous full-length essay questions with sample answers —providing further practice to test your knowledge and deepen your learning.
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In the Age of Corona: online skills lessons –a dream come true

AALS 2016, after CALI’s early morning breakfast meeting, I found myself in the elevator with Deb Quentel.  CALI’s newly released set of skills lessons trace back to that elevator!  Deb and I talked then and then at length when I returned to South Florida.  I shared how excited I was about the lessons, tracking and assessment opportunities. I incorporated CALI lessons right away into 2L and 3L courses in the ASP department I directed at NSU, and I spoke with Deb about ideas to create skills lessons –for all law students including 1Ls. I did not have the bandwidth then to develop them, but I held on tightly to the ideas.

Fast forward to the CALI annual conference in 2018. I sat  with John Mayer and we talked at length.  I suggested CALI consider developing law school ASP skills lessons, and encouraged CALI to apply for an AccessLex Grant to fund the effort. The rest, as they say, is history. The Law School Academic and Skills Lessons are live! Thank you, CALI. And, thank you, AccessLex!

These lessons will allow ASPers nationwide to expand their reach and their offerings to students. As all of us who are or have been in the ASP trenches know just how important it is to have quality resources for our students. These are also all online so perfectly adaptable to the shift to online learning that the pandemic forced on us and that you all have embraced heroically. And, as if all of that were not enough, what I am most proud of is that these are not only the highest quality (and editable by faculty who use them), they are free to law students in CALI member schools. This project thus serves the invaluable purpose of democratizing reliable supplements. Already stretched financially to intolerable levels, with the negative economic ripple of this pandemic, the importance of free quality study and skills resources simply cannot be overstated.

So again, thank you John, Deb, Sara, and everyone at CALI. Thank you Allie, Laura, Nicole, Courtney, Renee, Melissa, and Steven — the faculty authors.  Thank you to all the peer reviewers. And, thank you AccessLex for supporting this project.

And, thanks to legal educators across the country. Our collective support of law students is vital, now more than ever, to maintain our nation as one governed by the rule of law.

In the Age of Coronavirus: Online Teaching Resources –a growing list

All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.

Compiling list below with resources for online teaching and learning, from messages exchanged by faculty as the nation’s law schools have gone online, overnight. Recalling a 2008 interview in the California Bar Journal, December 2008: “The curriculum includes live classes, assigned reading, video lectures, essays and tests in 11-day modules. “Other than eye contact and body language, the discussion is, in many ways, quite similar to that of a traditional law school classroom,” said Concord professor Sara Berman. And Berman, a UCLA School of Law graduate herself, sees advantages to a virtual classroom: The interaction is based solely on the discussion’s content, not on the student’s gender, race or looks, for example. Students don’t have to commute. They can review archived classes. And they gain extra experience in written communication.”  

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Miscellaneous Resources on Online Teaching and Learning*

*Not endorsing any of the resources below; just listing them.

https://www.cali.org/books/distance-learning-legal-education-design-delivery-and-recommended-practices (published guide.)

https://www.law.du.edu/online-learning-conference/conference-schedule  (Videos embedded in conference schedule)

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/03/assessment-in-online-law-school-classes.html

 

Thoughts for Law Professors Contemplating Moving to Virtual Classes, By Allie Robbins, March 10, 2020, https://passingthebar.blog/author/smashthebar/

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/academic_support/2020/03/online-learning-resources-and-tips.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fxoma+%28Law+School+Academic+Support+Blog%29

 

 

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/advice-online-teaching

Will update list, and again, not endorsing any of the above resources.

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All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.

The Age of Corona Virus: July Bar Exam??

All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.

A group of us who have been involved in lawyer licensing and legal education for many years lay out options for bar admission in the current context at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3559060.