By Sarah Morrison, Staff Writer
Many boomers remark, “Kids today just ain’t what they used to be,” yielding the response: “Okay boomer.” In actuality, there is some truth to this statement. Students entering law school today are far different than their peers of yesteryear.
In 1961, the average undergraduate student spent approximately 25 hours studying outside of class.[1] Today, the average undergraduate student spends approximately half of that time studying and achieves higher grades than her counterparts of the early sixties.[2] Perhaps today’s students are just lazier? The data suggests that this is not the case.[3] The explanation in the drastic change in study habits is found in the systemic changes to the structure of undergraduate education.[4]
Around the time of the Vietnam War, colleges began to inflate grades to keep students from being drafted.[5] Inflating grades simply meant that the average grade shifted from a “D” to a “C.”[6] However, grade inflation did not stop there.[7] In the 1980s, grades continued to rise when tuition rates began to spike.[8] The increase in tuition, which has steadily continued today, catalyzed a new approach to higher education – one of extrinsic motivation.[9] Students were no longer entering higher education to achieve higher cognitive awareness of the world around them, but to become gainfully employed.[10] Since college tuition rates were so high, obtaining a college education was equated with a high risk, so naturally, students and their parents expected a return on that investment.[11]
Thus, with the shift in motivation from intrinsic to extrinsic learning, coupled with steadily inflating grades, students expended fewer hours in their studies to achieve high grades.[12] Additionally, students began to change what and how they studied.[13] Liberal arts majors, such as those majoring in philosophy and English, have been replaced with pre-occupational majors, such as business and accounting.[14] Materially speaking, pre-occupational majors do not teach students to engage in developing advanced cognitive thinking, such as that required in law school.[15] In fact, studies have shown that improvement in cognitive thinking from freshman year to senior year has steadily been on the decline, and the greatest increases in this skill have been seen in white males from affluent backgrounds.[16] Other evidence regarding this disparity is that many minority and female students work during their undergrad years and therefore focus their studies in the direction of achieving a “means to an end”, rather than on cognitive thinking development.[17]
Furthermore, the No Child Left Behind Act went into enforcement in 2001, which created an incentive for schools to “teach to the test” or otherwise risk losing its funding.[18] The tests employed were multiple choice and schools across the nation worked to hone the deductive reasoning skills of their students to be successful in this testing platform.[19] Additionally, the tests were comprised of short passages and a high volume of multiple choice questions.[20] What resulted from this type of trained learning is that students entering law school today have not been challenged with reading long passages and delving into the ambiguities.[21] Again, a skill necessary for success in law school.[22]
In closing, due to the changes in undergraduate teaching that have lessened the requisite hourly study expenditures by students to learn outside of the classroom coupled with the deductive reasoning taught in high schools – today’s law students come to law school without the same cognitive thinking skills of prior students.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3378829
[2] Id.
[3] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2478823
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3378829
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] Id.
[10] Id.
[11] Id.
[12] Id.
[13] Id.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.
[17] Id.
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] Id.
[21] Rebecca Flanagan, Lucifer Goes to Law School: Towards Explaining and Minimizing Law Student Peer-to-Peer Harassment and Intimidation, 47 Washburn L.J. 453, 458 (2008).
[22] Kaci Bishop, Framing Failure in the Legal Classroom: Techniques for Encouraging Growth and Resilience, 70 Ark. L. Rev. 959, 978 (2018).
