The Laptop Debate Continues

Faculty members in all disciplines have debated for years whether students who use their laptops during class actually benefit.  Some claim that permitting laptops in Internet-enabled classrooms leads to students distracting themselves with Facebook, email, Twitter, etc., rather than focusing on the lecture or discussion.  I once visited an adjunct professor's class, and figured out that around 60% of the students were not using their laptops to take notes or do anything else related to that class.  When I mentioned this to the professor, he was surprised, thinking that all the clicking of keys meant that students were taking copious notes.  This was not the case.  The ease of distraction has led some professors to switch off Internet access altogether during their classes, which has always seemed rather paternalistic to me.  Law students are adults, and should be permitted to make their own decisions, even if the decisions are poor.  The other concern about laptops in the classroom is that students, instead of participating in the class, become scribes who take down every word that is said and do not retain anything they hear. 

When I was a student, I always found that I learned best by taking copious notes by hand.  I even chose my bar review course because it didn't have a lot of printed materials, but required students to attend lectures and take notes.  Something about taking down the information by hand seemed to help me retain it.  It wasn't just taking notes in class that helped me; I also went through my notes after the class and amplified and organized them.  It was the only way I could truly master the material. 

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education presents a study done by two researchers on students' note-taking preferences and supports those who believe that laptops are more hindrance to learning than help.  The researchers found that laptop users took more than twice as many notes as students who wrote longhand, but that "While more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindless transcribing content ... the benefit disappears." These findings will be published soon in an article entitled "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard:  Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-taking," in the journal Psychological Science.  This article is sure to fuel the ongoing debate over laptops in the classroom.

New Lawyers' Advice on Packaging Themselves for Public Service Jobs

For law students and recent graduates who may wish to look for work in public service areas, Prof. David Yamada has a classic article full of advice on packaging oneself for this field. Available on SSRN:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2165006

The Power of We: Pink, Networking, Mentoring! Blog Action Day 2012

Way back in 2006, I wrote a series of blog posts here, here, here, here and here that used the color pink as a way to think about so-called “feminine” aspects of the workplace and law school. I talked about my own experience as a child, law student, young lawyer and then law librarian. My reaction to the heavily male, patriarchal law school culture, like that of many young women, was to join up as one of the guys, even when I was pregnant! It made for a very alienated young law student, lawyer and law librarian – alienated from myself! And my guess is that it’s not just women, but also anybody who has an emotional, expressive side to their personality that gets suppressed in the traditional law school culture! So many of us are round pegs trying to fit into those square holes!

One important part of repairing the brokenness we experience in the law school culture is reaching out, and building an awareness that there is WE. Law students need to know that they are not alone, and so do young (and older!) lawyers and librarians who may be struggling with identity and simple expression of their selves. Times have changed since I went to law school – there are many organizations at most schools and later:

By gender and sexual orientation and identification:
National Womens’ Law Students Association (NWLSA) (these seem to be organized by school, for example at my school, Suffolk

National Women Law Students’ Organization (apparently affiliated with Ms JD blog)



National LGBT Bar Association Law Student Congress


By Ethnicity:
National Black Law Students Association

National Latin American Law Student Association

Hispanic Law Student Association (seems to be school affiliated)

Asian-Pacific American Law Student Association

National Native American Law Student Association

By Religious Affiliation:
(I don’t find any national association for Buddhists, B’hai’s, Hindus or Sikhs though we have small groups for law students at our school)

Catholic Law Students Association

Christian Legal Society (a more fundamentalist flavor than some sects)

National Jewish Law Students Association (Affiliated with Hillel -- does that explain everything?)


National Muslim Law Students Association

These student organizations raise money for causes, they offer advice and assistance for members, as well as mentoring and job networking. They are powerful organizations for students to empower themselves and to find a voice in an intimidating world. One example might be found here, in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, requesting him to investigate the New York City police’s surveillance of Muslim members of the community. Among a long and diverse list of signing organization is the National Muslim Law Students Association and Muslim Law Students Association – New York University School of Law.

You don't have to think pink to see how much more powerful we are when we stand together for whatever we are, we believe in, or hope for. But I think it helps.

More hurdles for job seekers -- bloodhounds of the web!

The New York Times features an in-depth article on the start-up Social Intelligence which helps human resources do deep background checks on possible hires. They scour the web, looking not just at social networking sites, but all sorts of sites such as Craig's List or Flickr, to see what sorts of things might be revealed about the applicant. The applicant is first asked if he or she consents to a background check. (Don't be a fool! But what will it say about you if you refuse?!) Also, the individual is shown the results of the search before it is reported back to the potential employer. And apparently the searches shouldn't cover the sorts of questions that are out of bounds for an employer to ask in an interview (Like, are you married? Do you have children?)

The biggest problem for young people is that they cannot control what others put up on the Internet. If a friend posts a picture of them, even if they ask very quickly for the photo to be taken down, it already may well have been duplicated and shared across the web in places they know nothing about. It is very difficult for "digital natives" to control images in particular, though they can certainly be circumspect themselves.

The best rule is not to post anything online that you would not want published on the front page of a major paper. Sadly that flies in the face of the current youth culture!

The article in the Times recounts several examples of people who failed to get a job because of "dirt" uncovered by "Social Intelligence." There was a woman who applied for a job at a hospital, but the company found nude photos she had posted at an image sharing site (well, the article made it sound as though she had posted them). The Times also reported another applicant who was using Oxycontin, as found through Craigslist. They don't talk about photos of wild parties, but I am sure that is something that employers don't want to see.

On the other hand, perhaps, by looking on the Internet, the company will uncover evidence that will support your resume's list of awards and even have nice comments from colleagues or teachers or peers about your abilities (we can hope!). That's the nice little carrot that Social Intelligence holds out to applicants at their website.

Photo of a bloodhound is courtesy of http://dogsranch.com/the-bloodhound.html/bloodhound

Starting Pay for New JDs is Trending Down

NALP (National Association for Law Placement) issued a press release on the employment and salaries secured by the graduates of the class of 2010. It is not a happy picture, which should come as no surprise.

They had earlier reported (in June) that 50.9% of the 2010 grads had jobs compared to 55.9% of the 2009 class. And more of the jobs are in smaller firms than in earlier-graduating classes. As we will see, this tends to depress the salaries. Part-time jobs make up about 11% of the jobs reported to NALP overall of the jobs requiring bar passage. But part-time jobs are especially prevalent in the academic sector and public interest sector, for jobs requiring bar passage. Only 68.4% of the class of 2010 reported to NALP that they had obtained jobs for which bar passage was required by the time of this report, and only 64% had full time employment in jobs requiring bar passage. 27% of the jobs were temporary, including judicial clerkships. Excluding clerkships, the percent of recent grads holding temporary jobs requiring bar passage is 19%.

2009

Nat'l.
Median $72,000

Nat'l
Mean $93,454

2010

Nat'l
Median $63,000 (down ~13%)



Nat'l.
Mean $84,111 (down ~10%)


* All figures for those reporting full time work. Note that there is a large discrepancy between large firm salaries, which tend to cluster between $145-160,000 and small firm and other salaries, which cluster around $40-65,000. This means that there are very few salaries that actually fall anywhere near the mean or median points. They should actually skip this national overall analysis and just do the separate analysis for large firm rates and small firm and alternate practice rates, I think!

By type of work:

Law firm:

2009

Nat'l.
Median $130,000

2010

Nat'l
Median $104,000 (down ~20%)


Adjusted
Mean

2010

$93,748 (they did not include the 2009 figure)

Virtually no change from last year for public service & government salaries. So most of the downward pressure on the salaries is coming in the law firm market.

I recommend reading the short report in full, though it is not happy news.

Now I Understand

In my Advanced Legal Research course, I have a reputation for being a hard grader (I prefer to think of myself as being fair rather than hard) and for assigning a lot of work. My students are asked to prepare a research guide on a discrete area of the law, and it does take a good bit of time to do this assignment well. I have noticed that students complain more now than they did in the past about the work required for the research guide even though the course now carries three credits; for years, it carried only two. My faculty colleagues have heard the same complaints about their courses. I have often wondered why students are more likely to complain about the workload now than they did in the past. Perhaps it is because they are graduating from college unaccustomed to working hard.

The Boston Globe has reported that a new study "shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping." In 1961, "the average student at a four-year college ... studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours." This trend is seen at all colleges, no matter how selective. The study was conducted by Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, two economics professors, and will soon be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics. It corroborates anecdotal evidence, noted in "survey after survey since 2000 ... [that] college and high school students ... are simply not studying very much at all." Some professors have been aware of this trend for some time.

Could their failure to study in college be the reason some students arrive at law school mentally unprepared for the amount of work they will have to do? I sometimes work with students who are experiencing academic difficulties. When I tell them they should be studying three to four hours for each hour they spend in the classroom, which I think is a good rule of thumb for law school, they are incredulous. None of them study this much. Nor do they think they should have to study this much.

Why don't students study as much as they used to? The study's authors bring up the "easy culprits--the allure of the Internet ... the advent of new technologies ... , and the changing demographics of college campuses ..." but conclude that they are not to blame. Rather, students' failure to work hard may well be caused by "the growing power of students and professors' unwillingness to challenge them." The study's authors offer a theory that

[S]uggests that the cause, or at least one of them, is a breakdown in the professor-student relationship. Instead of a dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, the more common scenario these days ... is one in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

"No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class ... To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort."

Has the educational system been undermined by students' evaluations of their professors? "Course evaluations have created a sort of 'nonagression pact' ...where professors--especially ones seeking tenure--go easy on the homework and students, in turn, give glowing course evaluations." At some undergraduate schools, administrators are trying to combat the insidious effect of student evaluations by putting less emphasis on them during tenure decisions, and by directing professors "to give explicit tasks to students. Just telling them to read these days is often considered 'too generic, too general of a request ...' And many professors today are using Internet-based systems ... where students are required to log on and write about the assigned reading ... " However, at most schools, the issue isn't even being acknowledged by administrators.