-- ElizabethOsei - 18 Jan 2021

I am not a fan. Even before applying to law school, I knew about "cold calls." I remember friends telling me about their apprehension of applying to law school simply because of the Socratic method. I thought it was weird that they would allow something so trivial, so small deter them from becoming an attorney. However, the day before I was "on-call" for my Civil Procedure Class, that fear was realized. We've been exploring what it is to be creative in law school, and to me, only our Professors are allowed to be creative using this method. I imagine our Professors have an exact answer or path they want us to follow when they ask their questions. In one of my doctrinal classes, my Professor explicitly told me he wanted me to read his mind. I am still recovering from that trauma.

My problem with the Socratic method is that I think it does more for the Professor than for the students. Professors get insight into how well students "perform" on the spot. However, I spend all class worried and anxious that I might be called on to explain some nuance that I do not understand or recall a small fact from one of the 10 cases I read days ago. After going through it last semester, I realized I never remembered anything from my cold call; I would always blackout--apparently, this was something familiar among many of my peers. Which leads me to ask, why do we still use it? I found absolutely no correlation between cold call performance and test performance. With test performance culminating in most if not all of our grades--why do we still use the Socratic method? Voluntary participation, rather than random cold calls, can accomplish learning the law just as well, or perhaps even better. Volunteering can enable students to gain more confidence in understanding the law and eliminate most of the anxiety that entirely only deter/get in the way of learning. I am all for abandoning tradition for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness.