“For students who enter law school with less strong LSAT scores, academic backgrounds, and analytical skills, then, how well they do on the bar exam will reflect how well the law school acted to provide necessary academic support.”
For too long, academic support programs have been viewed as the unwanted stepchild of legal education. These programs have existed in the dark shadows of legal education, reserved for students deemed “at risk” for satisfactorily completing law school or successfully passing the bar examination, and focused on keeping students above the dreaded academic dismissal threshold. The time has arrived for the remedial—and stereotypical—character of academic support to meet its demise and to be reborn as a program that helps all students become better lawyers, not just better law students.
To be sure, academic competency is critical to professional success, but including professional competency in the mission of an academic success program will enhance the educational and professional outcomes of all students. In this article, we propose a groundbreaking academic success program that has three core components:
- The Assessment Focus. The progress of all students, not merely “at-risk” students, should be continuously monitored through the use of formative and summative assessments that are tied to the achievement of real-world learning outcomes, including, but not limited to, analytical thinking, legal writing, problem solving, and strategic judgment.
- The Experiential Component. The experiential component focuses on curricular innovation and competency-based instruction that invests in the success of all students, and that more closely connects academic support programs to real world learning outcomes and lawyering tasks.
- The Integration Requirement. Academic success programs should be integrated with doctrinal and skills courses across and throughout the curriculum to enable collaboration with doctrinal and skills faculty on, among other things, the quality and efficacy of formative and summative assessments and student attainments of core legal competencies.
In addition, as detailed below, using feedback loops enables law schools to measure student and cohort attainment of learning outcomes, evaluate the effectiveness of formative, reflective, and summative assessments, and ensure that faculty feedback is specific, timely, and relevant.
Integrating academic support into and throughout the curriculum should be part of a broader strategy by law schools to “[d]evelop new ways of balancing responsible curricula and pedagogies, cost-effectiveness, and alternative revenue streams by strongly encouraging and supporting experimentation and innovation among law schools.”
Ultimately, the relevance—and necessity—of designing comprehensive academic support and bar preparation programs reflects the realities of legal education today: larger numbers of incoming law students are less prepared, bar passage rates are falling at many law schools, and writing skills are underdeveloped. When academic support programs are restricted to one segment of the student population or limited in their pedagogical purposes, all students are deprived of a resource that can maximize outcomes and preparedness for the bar examination. Academic success programs should no longer serve a negative function (to help students avoid dismissal or substandard performance), but should embrace a positive mission that improves the skills of even the brightest students.
In this article, we propose a groundbreaking academic success program that was adopted and implemented at Indiana Tech Law School, and that has revolutionized the way legal education is delivered. Part II discusses the flaws underpinning many academic support programs today, and examines the consequences, including the perception that academic support is only for “bad students,” and the restrictive focus on academic rather than professional competency, which has undermined its pedagogical value. Part III sets forth the innovative academic success program at Indiana Tech Law School. The program incorporates experiential, integrated, and assessment-driven components in a manner that transcends the boundaries between academic success and the broader curriculum, and bridges the divide between legal education and the practice of law. After all, law schools have an ethical obligation to ensure that graduates can competently and ethically practice law, and legal education will “serve the public interest by . . . encouraging more attention to services, outcomes, and value delivered to law students.”