Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

Today I'm previewing an upcoming Legal Speak podcast in which I discuss ways to improve the law school finals model with Ohio State law professor Ruth Colker and 1L Amanda Maxfield. I'm also breaking down a new BARBRI survey that found incoming law students are no fans of POTUS. And finally, I'm looking at the significance of Daniel Thies' nomination to the ABA's law school oversight council.

I'm off to the beach next week (#sorrynotsorry) but Ahead of the Curve will be back on May 21, which my wall calendar helpfully tells me is Victoria Day. No clue what that means.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ.

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Do Law School Finals Pass the Test?

The carrels are full. Highlighters have run dry. Students are running on coffee and adrenaline.

It's finals season!

In honor of spring semester exams, I'm previewing an upcoming Legal Speak podcast in which I chat with Ruth Colker, a professor at the Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law, and first-year law student Amanda Maxfield. (The podcast is slated to come out Friday. You can find it on Law.com, Apple Podcasts, Google Play or Libsyn.)

I wanted to know whether it's time to rethink the traditional law school finals model, in which first-year grades boil down to a single, three or four-hour essay exam. Is there a better way to test?

The short answer: Yes.

Let's run down the drawbacks of the prevailing system.

➤➤The single-shot final puts a lot of pressure on law students, who know that those first-year grades play an outsized role in determining whether they make law review, and get plum summer jobs and clerkships. And there is that pesky curve…(I'll point out here that research shows law students have relatively high rates of anxiety.)

➤➤Not every law student performs well on timed exams, and that format advantages students who write quickly. As Colker told me, longer answers generally correlate to higher grades.

➤➤Law students don't necessarily know what professors are looking for in a law school exam answer if they've never had any practice.

So how do you fix it? Colker has been experimenting with a few different approaches. First, she offers her first-year torts students a voluntary midterm exam consisting of one essay question. Students receive feedback and a grade, though the midterm does not count toward their final course grade. (Colker and several of her OSU faculty colleagues conducted a study that found first-year students who received formative assessments midway through the semester on the whole ended up performing better than their classmates not just in that class, but in all their first-year classes.)

Colker also gives her class 12 hours to complete a take-home exam.

“My goal is to at least take out the time pressure and anxiety that we know a lot of students face. For some students, it's very hard to focus for four hours and do nothing else, and write as much as they can. On my exam, which is 12 hours long, I limit the number of words a student can write so pretty much every student turns in an exam of exactly the same length. Then I can compare the quality of the exams, all of which are the same length.”

I asked Maxfield how she felt about Colker's midterm and take-home final. She gave it a thumbs up.

“It helped me set expectations for a law school exam. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who got the midterm exam and thought, 'If I put down everything I know about torts down on this paper, I'll do great.' Obviously, that's not the reality of the situation.”

As for the take-home final, Maxfield said the format gave her time to really think through the questions and the best way to answer them without worrying about getting enough words on the page before time ran out.

—My final word (see what I did there?): Of course students do better on exams if they've had a chance to practice and get some feedback. That's a no brainer. But as Colker pointed out to me, there are some structural barriers to throwing out the finals model and moving toward lots of formative assessments. Namely, it's a lot of work for professors. Grading exams for sections of 80 or more students is already incredibly time consuming without adding midterms or other practice tests to the mix. So until first-year core courses magically shrink to 25 students, don't hold your breath for a sea change in how finals work.

Riding the Anti-Trump Wave

Is a blue wave of Democratic women heading to law schools this fall?

A new survey of more than 500 law applicants suggests so. BARBRI Law Preview, part of the BARBRI exam prep outfit, suggests that Donald Trump's presidency is at least partially responsible for the nearly nine percent surge in law applicants this year. It's not the first survey of aspiring law students to conclude that politics is driving interest in law school, but BARBRI's poll offers more demographic details than earlier ones. (Caveat: The poll was voluntary, not a random sample.) But here goes:

➤➤Of the respondents, 68 percent are women.

➤➤In terms of political affiliation, 58 percent said they are Democrats, 20 percent reported they are Independents, and just 11 percent identified as Republicans.

➤➤Among the respondents, 79 percent voted for Hillary Clinton, while a mere 10 percent voted for Trump.

➤➤Even more telling, 70 percent reported feeling “very unhappy” about President Trump and his policies, with another 15 percent reporting they are “somewhat unhappy.” That's 85 percent of the pool expressing dissatisfaction with the Commander in Chief. Two percent said they are “very happy” with Trump.

➤➤When queried about their primary reason for applying to law school, 38 percent said: “I want to advocate for change of social policies in the United States.” That was second only to, “I have always wanted to be a lawyer,” by the slightest margin. (I worry for the seven people who marked: “I don't know what else to do with my life.”)

The takeaway—We won't know until the fall whether the political composition and career aspirations of the new class is markedly different than its predecessors, but here are a few things to keep an eye on if that turns out to be true. Will demand for clinics spike as the class of 2021 moves into their 2L and 3L years? Will more students pursue public interest careers over private practice? Will the tenor of classroom discussions shift? I'm guessing the answer to that last question will be no, given that plenty of current law students are none too thrilled with Trump already. But I could see more students gravitating toward upper-level courses centered on policy making, for example.

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The New Kid On the ABA Block

The American Bar Association board that oversees law schools is about to get (a little) younger.

The ABA last week unveiled the slate of five new members who will join its 20-person Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar later this year and it includes—gasp—one person under the age of 35!

OK, that's not entirely true. The list also includes the next law student representative, but the council's lone law student member only serves one year. Spring chicken nominee Daniel Thies, a 2010 Harvard Law grad and Sidley Austin associate, will get a full three-year term. He will replace Boston University School of Law Dean Maureen O'Rourke, who graduated law school 1990, as the council's youngest member.

Thies' nomination is notable because the ABA has come under fire recently for lacking younger voices on the council, which regularly grapples with issues related to admissions, the bar exam, and student debt. Younger members will have a better sense of how those policies and problems impact students and recent graduates, according to advocates for a more youthful council.

Thies is no stranger to the ABA. He was the council's law student representative from 2008 to 2010, the council liaison from the Young Lawyers Division from 2013 to 2016, and currently serves on the ABA's Accreditation Committee.

I reached out to Thies to hear what he had to say about the nomination. He declined an interview, but offered this statement by email:

“Starting from my time on the Council as a law student member and through my service on the Accreditation Committee, I have been consistently impressed by the dedication and hard work of all of the volunteers and staff associated with the accreditation project. I'm honored by the nomination to the Council and am excited for the opportunity to work with such excellent people to continue the work of improving legal education.”

OK, so not terribly illuminating as to the significance of his appointment. So for that, we turn to Law School Transparency executive director Kyle McEntee, whose group co-authored a report earlier this year with the Iowa State Bar Association's Young Lawyers Division that called for younger council members, among other things.

“Big win,” McEntee said. “Daniel Thies is an enormously qualified young lawyer who will make an excellent addition to the Council. We look forward to seeing the Council welcome more young lawyers to their ranks in the coming years.”

My thoughts: Having sat through more than a few ABA council meetings, I can say with confidence that including a fairly recent law grad at the table is a good thing. Most council members seem to have a decent handle on the pressing issues of the day, but over the years a few have struck me as pretty out of touch with the current realities of legal education. I say bring on more young'uns!

Extra Credit Reading

—➤ The four-year drought of Supreme Court Justices speaking at law school commencement ceremonies is over! New York Law School has Stephen Breyer coming. Alas, Sonia Sotomayor had to cancel on the University of California, Davis School of Law due to a bum shoulder.

—➤ Should top law schools care about innovation? My colleague in Chicago, Roy Strom, posed that question and others to Northwestern Law Dean Dan Rodriguez. (Spoiler, he said yes, but you still should read the story here.)

—➤ This is pretty cool. A student in Yale Law School's San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project was the genesis of a lawsuit filed last month by San Francisco against Attorney General Jeff Sessions over repealing Justice Department memos intended to protect human rights.

—➤ For bird lovers: A mom and dad osprey have nested in a lamppost above the University of Oregon School of Law. The school's response? Install a live webcam so everyone can watch as the avian parents watch over their three eggs. It's the perfect antidote to finals stress!