• I think your hypothesis might be correct for 2L, 3L, beyond, and maybe even spring of 1L. However, someone could know every bit of information in the best outline ever, and still do terrible on first semester exams because they never learned how to write a law school exam, analyze multiple issues quickly, and apply concepts to fact patterns in a logical fashion. I think that skill is learned by struggling through the material during the fall (as painful as that may be). Collaboration helps (especially when synthesizing material come exam time), but a lot of that process is internal at first. GH

• The content of education is empathy, and creativity, and likability, and leadership; and if the 1L core doesn't eradicate these traits, it teaches them only tangentially, or accidentally; which is why I would help a friend minimize the effort to get those grades that he truly needs -- for his self-esteem or his job search -- so he can maximize his efforts to learn these all-important skills. -- AndrewGradman - 30 Apr 2008

Pretend that the person you love wants out of law school the same thing you wanted out of law school. It's too late to ask, "how could we have done better?" We can only ask, "how can we help the next generation do better?"

A student empathizes with a professor by paraphrasing, into his own words, the professor's chosen language -- the syllabus and lecture -- the "primary sources".
He defines how his peers empathize with a professor by paraphrasing, into his own words, their own paraphrases of the primary sources -- the language of his study group (present classmates) or of multiple G-drive outlines (past classmates) -- the "secondary sources."

• Presenting success as measure of "empathy with the professor" elides a much more interesting claim about the nature of our education - namely, that the content itself is not intrinsically valuable, and success is only a matter of mimicking expectations. If that is what you mean to say - it's interesting and worth discussing directly. -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

• I didn't mean to give the impression that I believe success on 1L exams has any bearing on success in real life. 1L exams happen to be a domain in which one should limit one's actions to another's expectations; they are a pure empathy test. But I think that "success" lies precisely in learning in which domains, and to what degree, one should resist another's expectations. I think most human interactions fall into this category.
• There can be valuable content in an education, but what we learned in 1L year has a hideous content-to-noise ratio. Joseph says, "Isn't the important part of law school the process of figuring out the law from the noise?" and I respect that view, but I balance that against the role of the EDUCATOR, which is to give us clues, or a code, with which to make that separation.
  1. An education that asks students to draw those lines -- and gives them no feedback on their efforts -- risks creating a circus full of Legal Magicians.
  2. An education (even a legal education) that assumes that the opposite of noise is law, is not an education; or so we learned this semester? ...
• The content of education is empathy, and likability, and leadership; and if the 1L core doesn't eradicate these traits, it teaches them only tangentially, or accidentally; which is why I would help a friend minimize the effort to get whatever grades he truly needs -- for his self-esteem or his job search -- so he can maximize his efforts to learn these all-important skills. -- AndrewGradman - 30 Apr 2008

• Yes, the curve is bullshit. But Femi is right. If your goal is to achieve more confidence in your grades, you would have to do so by increasing your performance and abilities relative to everyone else's. Collaboration that enriches yourself and your classmates equally is not the way to do that. -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008
• Julia, I've modified my paragraph a bit: I don't want to characterize collaboration as a way to learn the material, so much as a way to CONSTRUCT the material. If we replace collaboration with exchange, we'd see: there exists no economy without exchange; that doesn't mean that people exchange out of altruism. -- AndrewGradman - 30 Apr 2008

• But, Joseph, I am very skeptical that law schools are trying to teach us to be good lawyers, given that 95% of us need to go to law firms to learn to be good lawyers. Hypothesis: good lawyers know how to get other lawyers to give them kickass outlines. -AG

• Do you have a study group? Have you ever collaborated with someone who has a different professor? Have you ever traded notes with someone in your class who's not in your study group? Do you really think it's impossible to grade a collaboration test on a curve? -AG

If the idea is to enrich learning through collaboration, I don't think that minimizing effort is the right criteria. Are you concerned with improving actual learning or merely grades?

• It sounds like you believe that high grades are correlated with good learning, and that the criteria we're graded on align with the things that we ought to learn. I respectfully disagree. The less time we spend studying for exams, the more time we have to actually learn. -AG

You seem to advocate pursuing the later without regard for the former, which seems like the exact wrong advice to give an incoming 1L. As for your initial question: if someone I loved were entering law school and I wanted to help them do better, I would tell them to relax.

Caring less about grades seems like the best way to maximize those dimensions - happiness, ability to learn, and all the other qualities of life.

• I am assuming people who come to law school knowing what grades they want, and knowing how happy they want to be. I believe they can get both, if they can get the right people to help them. The antidote to stressing over exams doesn't have to be caring less about exams. It could be better understanding exams. -AG

• Yes, the curve is bullshit. But Femi is right. If your goal is to achieve more confidence in your grades, you would have to do so by increasing your performance and abilities relative to everyone else's. Collaboration that enriches yourself and your classmates equally is not the way to do that. -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

• Is this characterization really useful? It seems like a needlessly complex way of saying that the professor teaches material, which students are expected to reproduce on the exam, and doing well is a matter of meeting that expectation. Why obfuscate it like this? Am I missing something? -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

• Presenting success as measure of "empathy with the professor" elides a much more interesting claim about the nature of our education - namely, that the content itself is not intrinsically valuable, and success is only a matter of mimicking expectations. If that is what you mean to say - it's interesting and worth discussing directly. -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

• Here again, you're flirting with the idea that the content of our education is not important. If you're gonna premise this whole project on that idea, I think you have to be able to defend it.-- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

My outlines for Contracts and Civil Procedure, combining the best of six G-Drive outlines, might permit a student to do this. I plan to contribute them to the G-Drive.

• Yes, the curve is bullshit. But Femi is right. If your goal is to achieve more confidence in your grades, you would have to do so by increasing your performance and abilities relative to everyone else's. Collaboration that enriches yourself and your classmates equally is not the way to do that. Also, your very last sentence seems backwards to me. You want to free us from understanding bad grades as insufficient empathy? I'm not sure anyone did understand them that way until you contrived it, and I'm not sure you've given us any reason to accept that characterization. -- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

As for your initial question: if someone I loved were entering law school and I wanted to help them do better, I would tell them to relax. Caring less about grades seems like the best way to maximize those dimensions - happiness, ability to learn, and all the other qualities of life.-- JuliaS - 30 Apr 2008

• Students can predict the upcoming exam as the one which a student empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.

• These texts (syllabus and lecture) are your "primary sources."
  

• Their efforts (your study group = present classmates / multiple G-drive outlines = past classmates) are your "secondary sources."

LESSON 1: DO NOT attempt to empathize with the professor privately; empathy is a relative term, a social construct, a function of the curve. Define a student empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor. All your learning is from your peers.

LESSON 2: Only bother with the primary sources when they differ from the secondary sources.

• If you find good G-Drive outlines, you'll rarely need to take class notes, because your teacher's lecture will differ little from past years' outlines;
• if you find your syllabus fully represented there, you'll only need to read a few cases -- won't even need to buy a casebook;
• and if you find enough G-Drive outlines, you'll only need a study group for social purposes.

• and the exam is the Law,

• the [exam] is the paraphrase of [lectures] that the [professor] is most likely to generate.
  
• Students can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a student empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.

• Define a student empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor.

1) RE my "assumptions" 1 & 2 & 3: ...
... the perception that there's insufficient data / insufficient methods / insufficient intelligence can all be paraphrased as saying "there's sufficient data, methods and intelligence ... but not enough TIME." Someone investing the time (as I have done) into the G-Drive outlines can create that magic document; the criticism, which is a good one, is that this technique is not TIME-EFFECTIVE; but that's just to say that we need to outsource the process.

2) The curve is bullshit. Teachers could just as well grade us in absolute terms and then tweak the boundaries to conform to the curve. It makes sense: we're a motley bunch ... given a fair test, a random cross-section of 90 1Ls is going to conform to a curve.
Given that fact: More CONFIDENCE in grades is what I'm after, not better grades -- my goal is to make the content of the class (the object of empathy) more objective, less fuzzy, so that a bad grade can be defined in terms of "not learning material" rather than (as it currently is) "insufficient empathy."

-- AndrewGradman - 29 Apr 2008

Andrew, and i've already said most of this to you already, but your lessons rely on a few assumptions that cannot be proven: 1) that there's as much data online as their is from other sources, 2) that any of us are able to separate the good or useful data from the misleading or irrelevant data without consulting secondary sources, and 3) that the person implementing the method is smart enough to infer a lot from outlines which are essentially summaries of a greater wealth of knowledge. These assumptions are unverifiable and will sometimes be true, but almost certainly not always.

I believe that the benefits of collaboration can be better achieved if we all work together to put more information online, in wikis and such, instead of just working together to better understand what is already there.

Finally, I think focusing on grades at all is dangerous because of the curve. If a single person collaborates better with others, that person will likely learn more and get better grades. But, if the whole school begins to collaborate better together, then we'll all learn more, but none of us will get better grades. If collaboration is going to be the primary means, then the primary goal should be better learning and not better grades.

-- OluwafemiMorohunfola - 25 Apr 2008

Pretend that the person you love wants out of law school the same thing you wanted out of law school.

• We can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a person empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.

• Define a person empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor.
  • Do this either by forming a study group (present classmates), or by using multiple G-drive outlines (past classmates).

• We can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a person empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.
  

Divide the labor (e.g. study group) into two functions: paraphrasing the primary sources (syllabus & lecture) and paraphrasing the secondary sources (G-drive outlines).

Lesson 1: Only bother with the primary sources when they differ from the secondary sources. You'll rarely need to take class notes, because your teacher's lecture will differ little from the G-Drive outlines reflecting past years; and, before the first day of class, you can determine that you'll only need to read a few cases -- that you don't even need to buy a casebook -- if you compare your syllabus with your g-drive outlines.

Holmes said that "The law consists of that paraphrase of Precedent that a judge is most likely to adopt." (j/k.)
If

• the professor is a common-law Judge,
• each day's lecture is a Precedent,
• and the Law is the exam,

• the exam is the paraphrase of lectures that the professor is most likely to generate.
  
• We can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a person empathizing with the professor is most likely to generate.
  

In principle, a single document could come into being that permits a future student to get a high grade without buying a casebook or transcribing a word of lecture. Indeed, my outlines for Contracts and Civil Procedure last semester would have permitted a student to do this, had my professors not, respectively, retired / been retired. I plan to contribute my outline to the G-Drive collection. To outlines one through six, there will now be seven.

Information equals the destruction of bad data. The problem is, that the addition of newer, better outlines makes it MORE difficult for future 1Ls to distinguish bad from good data. We are just adding new data, not new information, until we identify a force that can identify and destroy the bad data.

How do we find a Maxwell's Demon with the incentive to cull the data from the information?

Mina makes a good point: "do you mean "do better" only in terms of grades? quality/amount of knowledge gained? overall experience (including social life)? or all of the above?"
I was going to respond: "I wanted to discover how we could be altruistic to these persons, assuming that we can't know why they came to law school."
But that's really stupid.
Okay, new rule: when you answer the question, state what you think that the person you love wants out of law school -- and for best effect, make that equal to the thing you wanted out of law school.

"...how would you help that person do better than you did?"

Andrew, do you mean "do better" only in terms of grades? quality/amount of knowledge gained? overall experience (including social life)? or all of the above?

-- MinaNasseri - 24 Apr 2008

I sometimes feel that linear comments interrupt dialog. Thus, multiple comment boxes. Perhaps to correlate with multiple suggestions?

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008

Get hold of secondary sources: i.e., data that a person has interpreted and reduced. (Is the quality of the secondary source then a function of the quality of the reducer? Infinite regress? -- no. Think about it.)

In other words, don't rely on casebooks and lectures for your learning. Rely on "outlines" of your professor's class, and "case-briefs" of your professor's casebook, that other students have put together. Your goal is to accumulate and collate the outlines, using the skill described in the previous paragraph.

I plan to elaborate on this more soon. Sorry to disappoint.

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Apr 2008

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