What law schools can learn from a disrupted Spring 2020 semester

In the middle of a disrupted semester, law schools (and higher education in general) are making significant accommodations for faculty and students. Tenure clocks are delayed for a year, student evaluations won’t be used to evaluate faculty, grading policies have been altered, exam formats may change, and the list goes on.

But it would be a mistake for schools to throw up their hands at the end of the semester and say that nothing can be learned from it! Indeed, a great deal can be learned from this sudden experiment—yes, with some limited value and all appropriate caveats, but there’s much to consider.

Here are a couple things that law schools should look closely at after the end of the semester—and, in some cases, schools might want to start thinking about how to evaluate these things now.

First, classroom experiences. While student evaluations shouldn’t be used to evaluate teaching performance (indeed, perhaps they should be of limited value in all circumstances!), they can tell us a lot about the classroom experience of students as professors abruptly switched to online formats under a variety of approaches. Schools can look and see what might have worked or didn’t work. Synchronous or asynchronous? Traditional material or guest speakers?

Schools should comb through the student evaluations open-response components to figure out if any online practices were particularly successful—or particularly unsuccessful. Evaluations might include specific questions about the online components. Or they could be an entirely separate questionnaire submitted to students. Institutions should solicit from faculty their online pedagogy and see what can be gleaned from those practices and student reactions. This is particularly true given the Socratic-based casebook methods used in most law schools and particularly in most first-year or core curriculum.

Second, grading policies. Law schools around the country have implemented different grading policies in light of coronavirus-related disruption. Much is in dispute. Much, I think, is speculative. But whatever policy a school adopts, a school ought to examine whether the benefits or costs of the policy came to pass.

For schools that kept their grading as is: were second semester 1L grades as highly correlated with first semester as in previous 1L years? If they were less correlated, did it affect certain racial, gender, or socioeconomic groups more than others?

For schools that switched to optional pass-fail: did some students disproportionately take advantage of the pass-fail option—based on GPA quartile, demographics, etc.? Did students who remain with grades benefit from higher grades as pass-fail students worked "less," if all were curved together?

For schools that went to mandatory pass-fail: did students with better "resume bias" (e.g., elite undergraduate institutions) have a disproportionately better OCI experience than in previous years? Did bar passage rates worsen compared to graduates of other schools? [Of course, the economic downturn and alterations to the bar exam could affect this.] Did academic dismissal rates change?

These are just a few ideas to try to measure the effects of changes to policies and look for good or bad signs.

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I’m sure others will think of important things for law schools to reconsider—exam policies, attendance rules, faculty committees and meeting rules, “work from home” alternatives for faculty and staff, wet ink signature requirements, and so on. But I want to emphasize that schools should look to learn the right kinds of lessons from this disrupted semester.