Browsing Tag

Admissions

Jerome Organ

Law School Transfer Data and Professional Identity Formation

By: Jerry Organ, Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law

This blog posting updates my blog postings over the last several years regarding what we know about the transfer market, for example 2022, 2021 and 2020. With the ABA’s posting of the 2023 Standard 509 Reports, we now have a decade of more detailed transfer data from which to glean insights about the transfer market among law schools, which has been in decline for most of the last decade. This posting also includes a new section on transfer “feeder schools” and some reflections on whether and how law schools might be providing opportunities for professional identity formation for their transfer students.

Numbers of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers Continue to Decline to the Lowest Levels in the Last Decade

As shown in Table 1 below, the number of transfer students received by law schools in 2023 decreased for the third consecutive year to 1162, the smallest number of transfers in the last decade. For the last several years, the transfer market has been shrinking, having declined from 5.5% in 2014, to 4.7% in 2016, to 3.4% in 2019, to 3.0% in 2022 and again in 2023. Aside from a slight bump in 2017, and another bump in 2020, this drop reflects a continuation of a gradual decline in transfers over the last several years – from nearly 2200 to less than 1200 and from 5.5% of first-years in the previous fall to 3.0% (both down over 45%).

Table 1 – Number of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers from 2014-2023
After an increase in transfers in 2020, we have seen declines in 2021 to 1375 and 3.6%, 2022 to 1231 and 3.0%, and 2023 to 1162 and 3.0% – the lowest number and percentage in a decade.

My sense is that the dramatic increase in scholarship assistance over the last decade, including the elimination of conditional scholarships at dozens of law schools, has made the financial equation associated with transferring much less attractive. (The number of law schools with conditional scholarship programs dropped from roughly 140 in 2011 to fewer than 80 as of 2020.) If a student were going to be paying full tuition at a given law school and could transfer to a much higher ranked law school in the region for only marginal additional cost (and perhaps without having to move), transferring might make sense. But if a student has to forego scholarship assistance and absorb significantly more financial cost to transfer, then staying at the student’s initial law school might seem to make more sense.

SOME LAW SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE THE TRANSFER MARKET

Table 2 below lists the top 15 law schools participating in the transfer market in descending order in Summer 2020 (fall 2019 entering class), Summer 2021 (fall 2020 entering class), Summer 2022 (fall 2021 entering class), and Summer 2023 (fall 2022 entering class).

(Note that in Table 2 and in Table 4, the “repeat players” are bolded – those schools in the top 15 for all four years are in black, those schools in the top 15 for three of the four years are in blue.) Seven of the top 15 for 2023 have been on the list for the largest number of transfers all four years, with four having been on the list for three of the four years (including 2023). Florida dropped out of the top 15 this year after having been in the top 15 the prior four years, while Florida State and Miami dropped out of the top 15 this year after having been in the top 15 the prior three years. There are four newcomers to the list in 2023: Vanderbilt, Florida International, Hofstra, and St. John’s. Table 2 also shows that for 2023, the concentration of transfers in the top 15 law schools for transfers increased back to 50%, where it was in 2020, up from 43% in 2021 and 47% in 2022.

TABLE 2 — Largest Law Schools by Number of Transfers from 2020-2023

As shown in Table 3 below, if we focus just on the top ten law schools for transfers in, the total number of transfers is 494 – 43% of all transfers – the highest percentage in the last decade.

TABLE 3 – Totals for Top Ten Law Schools for Transfers In as a Percentage of All Transfers for 2014-2023
In terms of law schools with the highest percentage of transfers in as a percentage of their previous year’s first-year class, as shown below in Table 4, eight law schools have been on the list each of the last four years – Chicago, Florida, Florida State, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Northwestern and UNLV. Four law schools have been on the list three times in the last four years – Florida Int’l, Harvard, NYU, and Vanderbilt (including 2023). Two of the other three schools have been on the list in two of the last four years (including 2023) – Columbia and UCLA. The number of law schools welcoming transfers representing 20% or more of their first-year class has fallen from nine in 2013 (not shown), to none in 2019, four in 2020, two in 2021, and only one in 2022 and 2023 (Georgetown in both years).

TABLE 4 — Largest Law Schools by Transfers as a Percentage of Previous First-Year Class – 2020-2023
TRANSFER FEEDER SCHOOLS

There also are some law schools that appear consistently in the list of top feeder schools for transfers as shown below in Table 5. These fifteen schools have been responsible for roughly 25-30% of transfer students in each of the last three years.

TABLE 5 — Largest Law Schools by Transfers Out for 2021-2023

Eight law schools have been on the list of top transfer out law schools in each of the last three years – American, Barry University, Brooklyn Law School, George Washington University, Nova Southeastern, Touro University, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and the University of Miami. There are three additional law schools on the list in two of the last three years (including 2023): Boston University, Stetson University College of Law, and University of Maryland. In addition, there are three schools that made the list of the top-15 law schools for transfers out in both 2021 and 2022, but not in 2023: Southwestern University, St. Thomas University (Florida), and Widener University-Delaware.

Notably, two of these schools – George Washington University and Miami — show up on both the transfer out in Table 5 and the transfer in list above in Table 2. They are losing students to higher-ranked law schools and then back-filling with their own transfers from lower-ranked schools.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MARKETS –

Starting in December 2014, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar began collecting and requiring law schools with 12 or more transfers in to report not only the number of students who have transferred in, but also the law schools from which they came (indicating the number from each law school). In addition, the law schools with 12 or more transfers in had to report the 75%, 50% and 25% first-year, law school GPAs of the students who transferred in. This allows one to look at where students are coming from and are going to, as well as the first-year GPA profile of students transferring in to different law schools.

Table 6 below focuses on the seven law schools in Table 2 that have been among the top-15 in terms of number of transfers in for each of the last four years, presented in descending U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) rank. Table 6 indicates the extent to which these seven law schools were attracting transfers from the geographic region in which they are located and highlights that the transfer market, to some extent, is a set of regional sub-markets.

TABLE 6 — Percentage of Transfers from Within Geographic Region 2021-2022-2023 and Top Feeder School for 2023 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top-15 for Transfers In for 2021, 2021, and 2023

All seven law schools had at least 35% of their transfers from the region in which they are located. Two of these seven law schools, Northwestern and Florida, obtained most of their transfers from within the geographic region within which the law school is located for the last three years, (with 80% for Northwestern and 60% for Florida in 2023). On the other hand, three law schools (Harvard and Georgetown and George Washington) had 48% or fewer of their transfers from within the region in which the law school is located in each of the last three years.

When one looks at the transfer out schools in Table 5 in comparison with the transfer in schools in Table 2, one can see some of the regional realities. In Florida, Barry University, Miami, Nova Southeastern, St. Thomas University, and Stetson are transfer feeder schools with Florida, Florida International, Florida State, and Miami receiving a number of those transfers. In the Mid-Atlantic, American, Baltimore, Catholic, George Washington University, and Maryland are transfer feeder schools with George Mason, Georgetown, and George Washington receiving a number of transfers. In California, Loyola Marymount, Southwestern, and the University of California College of Law San Francisco are transfer feeder schools with Loyola Marymount, University of California Berkeley, and University of California Los Angeles receiving a number of transfers.

Table 6 also identifies the law school that provided the largest number of transfers to each listed law school in 2023, as well as the percentage of transfers that came from that school. One of the seven law schools had a significant percentage (more than 20%) of its transfers in from one feeder school – Northwestern – with 25% of its transfers coming from Loyola-Chicago (and over 65% from Loyola/DePaul/UIC).

Notably, six of these seven law schools that are consistent players in the transfer market are on the East Coast (Harvard, Columbia, Florida, George Mason, Georgetown, and George Washington) while one is in the Midwest (Northwestern).

VARIED QUALITY OF THE TRANSFER POOL

Table 7 below shows the tiers of law schools from which these seven largest law schools in the transfer market for each of the last four years received their transfer students. Four of the seven law schools that consistently have high numbers of transfers in are ranked in the top 15 in U.S. News, while the other three are ranked between 28 (Florida and George Mason) and 41 (George Washington).

TABLE 7 — Percentage of Transfers from Different Tiers of School(s) for 2021, 2022 and 2023 at the Seven Law Schools Among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023

Two of the seven law schools – Harvard (no lower than 72%) and Columbia (no lower than 55%) — have consistently had large percentages of their transfers from law schools ranked between 1 and 50 in the U.S. News rankings. By contrast, in 2023, four of these seven law schools had more than 40% of their transfers from law schools ranked 101 or lower (Florida, George Mason, George Washington, and Northwestern).

TABLE 8 — First-Year Law School 75th/50th/25thGPA of Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023

Table 8 above highlights the reported GPAs of transfers in for these seven law schools. In looking at Table 8, one quickly sees that of the four law schools ranked in the U.S. News top-15, only one – Harvard — has a 50th GPA for transfers in 2023 that is above 3.9, and a 25th GPA of 3.8 and above. Harvard also is accepting most of its transfers in from top-50 law schools, making it clear that it is accepting transfers in who could have been admitted to Harvard in the first instance. Columbia is a close second, with all three of its metrics close to 0.1 below those of Harvard.

The other two top-15 law schools – Northwestern and Georgetown – are a step below in terms of the credentials of their transfers, with 50th GPAs of 3.75 and 3.67, respectively, and with 25th GPAs of 3.63 and 3.55, respectively, in 2023. In 2023, more than 65% of Georgetown’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower while 75% of Northwestern’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower. For Georgetown and Northwestern, with a majority of their transfers coming from law schools ranked outside the top 50, many of these transfer students may not have had the credentials to be admitted as first-year students at Georgetown or Northwestern.

Once you drop out of the top-15, the other three law schools – Florida (3.55), George Mason (3.42), and George Washington (3.35) – each has a 50th GPA well below that of the other four law schools on the list and 25th GPAs that drop to 3.33, 3.31, and 3.23, respectively. With 85% or more of these transfers coming from law schools ranked 51 or lower, these law schools clearly are welcoming a number of transfer students whose entering credentials almost certainly were sufficiently distinct from each of those law schools’ entering class credentials that the transfer students they are admitting would not have been admitted as first-year students in the prior year.

STILL MANY UNKNOWNS

As I have noted for the last few years, these more detailed transfer data from the ABA should be very helpful to prospective law students and pre-law advisors, and to current law students who are considering transferring. These data give them a better idea of what transfer opportunities might be available depending upon where they are planning to go to law school (or are presently enrolled as a first-year student).

Even with this more granular data now available, however, there still are a significant number of unknowns relating to transfer students, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity of transfer students and performance of transfer students at their new law school (both academically and in terms of bar passage and employment).

With the increased emphasis on professional identity formation reflected in ABA Standard 303(b)(3) and (c), there may be questions about how law schools are addressing professional identity formation for transfer students, particularly at those law schools that have added a first-year course/program focused on professional development or professional identity formation.

Are these law schools requiring transfers to take these courses with their incoming first-year students? Are there specific professional development or professional identity formation courses structured for transfer students at those law schools with a significant cohort of transfer students (10-15 or more)? Are there better ways to address the professional identity formation of transfer students that would help them integrate into the law school community into which they are transferring? These are questions for which additional research would be warranted.

Please feel free to contact me at jmorgan@stthomas.edu should you have any comments or questions.

Jerome Organ is the Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law

May 7, 2024 by hami3258

David Grenardo

Breaking Down Siloes and Building Up Students: The Transformational Possibilities of Professional Identity Formation

By: David A. Grenardo, Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law

Three national leaders in professional identity formation—Lindsey P. Gustafson, Aric K. Short, and Robin Thorner—came together to author an exceptional article focused on professional identity formation. Their article, Breaking Down Siloes and Building Up Students: The Transformational Possibilities of Professional Identity Formation, will be part of the University of St. Thomas Law Journal’s spring 2023 symposium issue that will explore pedagogies relating to professional identity formation.

Here is the abstract of the article:

Under the ABA’s sequenced approach to implementation of Standard 303(b)(3), schools should now have developed plans for providing opportunities for professional identity formation and should be implementing them. These plans must provide students with an “intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” In addition, these plans should provide for frequent opportunities for development, “during each year of law school and in a variety of courses and co-curricular and professional development activities.”

Because Standard 303(b)(3) is necessarily tied to the unique character, existing structures, and available resources of a law school, each school’s plan will be different. That has been our experience as we have worked as professional identity formation leaders in different roles with varying perspectives: Lindsey Gustafson at the William H. Bowen School of Law, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is a current Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a skills and doctrinal professor; Aric Short at the Texas A&M School of Law is a former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, a doctrinal professor, and currently serves as the Director of the Professionalism and Leadership Program; and Robin Thorner at St. Mary’s University School of Law is an Assistant Dean for Career Strategy, a teaching adjunct, and the current Director of Professional Identity Formation.

In this essay, we hope to emphasize that professional identity formation efforts can occur all across the law school’s operations, from administrative offices to classrooms to voluntary student activities. We also provide specific examples of how schools can be more intentional and explicit as they weave together multiple professional identity formation opportunities for their students. This process takes time and attention, but it creates a powerful whole-building approach to identity formation that not only complies with 303(b)(3), but also best positions our students for a successful, fulfilling, and impactful career in law.

A link to the article can be found here.

Should you have any questions or comments about the article, please feel free to contact any or all of the authors at lpgustafson@ualr.edu, ashort@law.tamu.edu, and rthorner@stmarytx.edu.

September 5, 2023 by gren2380

Andrele St. Val, Ann Sinsheimer, Ciara Willett, Omid Fotuhi

Fostering Resilience and Engagement in Law Students

By: Dr. Ann Sinsheimer, Professor of Legal Writing, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Dr. Omid Fotuhi, Research Psychologist, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
Andrele St. Val, Assistant Professor of Legal Writing, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Ciara Willett, Senior Data Scientist, Nielsen

Introduction

For years, scholars have been calling for a change to legal education—to modernize and humanize the system, to make it more inclusive, and to help students maintain balance. Previous efforts within the law community have used a top-down approach to address these concerns, in which interventions and changes are implemented without consulting the students affected by these policies. At the University of Pittsburgh, through the support of researcher partnerships and grants, we have developed a novel approach—listening to and highlighting students’ experiences while implementing a series of targeted, tailored, and well-timed psychological interventions that emphasize their voices and concerns.

First and foremost, our goals are to improve the law school student experience and foster an environment that supports their academic and professional growth. Additionally, we believe that there are potential ancillary effects across the institution (e.g., admissions, student retention, alumni engagement). In the rest of our post, we describe the origins of The Fostering Resilience and Engagement Project, what we have learned thus far, our future directions and goals, and our recommendations for other law schools or professional programs that wish to adopt a similar model.^[i]

Origins of The Fostering Resilience and Engagement Project

While teaching Legal Writing to first-year law students, Dr. Sinsheimer began to notice a pattern. In August, the first-year law students are full of enthusiasm. By the end of October, many are full of anxiety and concerned about exams, worried that law school was not the right choice, and unsure whether their grades will be good enough to find a summer job. Some students feel a tremendous pressure that their first-year performance means “everything” to their future as lawyers; other students seem to regard critical feedback as a statement of their ability instead of an opportunity for growth. If the students fail to perform at the level they expect of themselves, they begin to doubt their ability to practice law. By the end of the year, more than a few students are disenchanted with the process of legal education—a common experience throughout U.S. law schools. Troubled by this pattern, Dr. Sinsheimer looked for ways to make her students more resilient and the process more humane.

In 2018, she met Dr. Omid Fotuhi, a research psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Fotuhi was researching psychological interventions designed to help students to adopt “adaptive mindsets”, specifically by studying how students deal with uncertainty around belonging in new circumstances. Having worked primarily with the undergraduate population, Dr. Fotuhi was interested in how graduate and professional school environments might differ. Together, we began our project at Pitt Law. We were also fortunate to recruit others, specifically Professor Andrele St. Val and our Data Scientist Ciara Willett.

Understanding the Problem

Our first step was to understand the law students’ perspectives of their experiences. We began with focus groups and follow-up surveys distributed to students from each year in the law program. Approaching students to discuss and process their experiences was novel for them, and a sort of intervention itself. One student wrote: “I’ll never be able to fully express the impact the anonymous class exercise of sharing our law school concerns had on me. It completely changed my sense of belonging and outlook on law school for the better.”

Several themes emerged from these initial discussions, and we found that many struggles in law school were shared among first-, second-, and third-year students. For example, many students felt that they didn’t measure up to the “right” law student profile, and several discussed facing an atmosphere of hostile competitiveness. However, our students also expressed “pluralistic ignorance” in their responses—an experience similar to imposter syndrome in which someone mistakenly feels that they are the only one struggling.

Many of the responses echoed features or ‘symptoms’ of a “fixed mindset”— believing that one has a fixed amount of intelligence or talent, and that there is no opportunity for change or growth. Researchers have found that a fixed mindset approach to learning can lead to unproductive competition, uncertainty about belonging to a community or institution (e.g., law school), disengagement, discouragement, apathy, and quitting. In contrast, the adoption of a “growth” mindset—believing that one’s abilities can be developed and that everyone can grow and succeed—is associated with resilience, persistence, and greater abilities to adapt to new situations and deal with new challenges.

Early on in this project, considering students’ mindsets within a “growth” or “fixed” framework helped us to identify appropriate interventions and place students’ experiences in context. We have since learned, however, that this binary perspective is too limited to fully capture our students’ experiences, which involve the following: mindsets that relate to belonging or uncertainty around belonging; one’s sense of relevance and meaning; one’s identity and value in the world; and self-management and performance.

Belongingness Intervention

Our next step was to design a belongingness intervention aimed at fostering greater resilience and engagement in our students. Specifically, we sought to target factors that most powerfully impact students’ perceptions about their potential within the Pitt Law program. The most effective interventions address factors that include both internal qualities (e.g., beliefs, attributions) and external qualities (e.g., messages in the environment), especially when those interventions are tailored to a specific group.

We designed the interventions based on what we learned about the Pitt Law student experience and prior studies that have targeted belonging uncertainty in students from underrepresented populations. These interventions were found to influence performance and well-being long after the intervention was delivered. Our research revealed that, while some students did struggle with a fixed mindset about their potential and abilities, these beliefs did not seem to stem from their pre-existing experiences or backgrounds. Rather, students consistently brought up forces within the law school environment that shaped their beliefs about their potential and put their sense of belonging into question. Therefore, we created a customized intervention program that primarily addressed students’ uncertainties about belonging, while also addressing institutional elements that impacted their growth mindset.

Our Design

We intentionally incorporated the intervention into Pitt Law’s two-semester legal writing curriculum because the small class size, frequency of student contact hours, and opportunity for reflection make this course and the professors well suited for this work. We also planned the timing of the interventions to occur at the beginning of the second semester, after students received their first semester grades in law school and when their anxiety levels are high.

Because our study is the first to empirically test the efficacy of a belongingness intervention for law students, we wanted to compare different methods of delivery. Each course section was assigned to one of three conditions: an in-person version (conducted via Zoom during the pandemic) that involved group discussions facilitated by an expert or trained facilitator during class time, an online version that students completed independently, or a control/comparison group.

The in-person intervention involved group discussions led by Dr. Fotuhi and followed a predetermined structure. First, Dr. Fotuhi gave an introduction that normalized common challenges among students. He also emphasized that the law students were the current foremost experts on the law student experience, and that their highly valued insights would be used to help future students during their transition to law school—a sophisticated psychological strategy designed to reduce the defensive disengagement that often comes with serving “helpful” information to students in need. Second, Dr. Fotuhi gradually constructed an environment of disclosure, starting with an icebreaker to help students feel more comfortable sharing. Third, the students wrote down three good and three bad experiences from law school. They were then asked to share more about these experiences and what advice they would give to incoming students. During this elaboration portion, Dr. Fotuhi introduced language that humanized the student experience (e.g., the notion of ‘pluralistic ignorance’) and encouraged students to reframe their viewpoints from a different perspective. For example, in one session, a few students talked about how their own unique training and prior experiences did not align with what a typical or ideal Pitt Law student might look like. Rather quickly, nearly all the students shared having had the same experience, which led to the realization that there is no one “right” profile for the typical Pitt law student. With this gained insight, the entire class seemed to have a collective sigh of relief as they realized that their uniqueness was actually a point of commonality with their peers.

The main difference in the online intervention is that students completed the exercise individually; however, we still wanted to emphasize the shared nature of experiences in law school while asking students to reflect on their own experiences. To this end, students read a set of anonymous responses from our initial focus groups and surveys, which described other law students’ experiences and struggles. Then, the students were asked to write a paragraph that reflected on their own experiences in law school.

Our Findings (Thus Far) & Future Directions

We evaluated the impact of the belongingness intervention and compared the two different methods of implementation (in-person versus online) with surveys distributed to law students at three time points in their first year: a baseline survey during orientation (August); a post-intervention survey at the start of their second semester (January); and a final follow-up survey at the end of the second semester (April). So far, we have analyzed the results of our interventions with three first-year cohorts (2019, 2020, and 2021) and are currently analyzing our 2022 cohort data.

In the baseline and post-intervention surveys, we asked students to talk about their experiences during the transition to law school. Students voiced concerns about time management, whether they would be able to keep up with the workload, (e.g., “making the adjustment to having constant work and stress”), and the competitive environment (e.g., “Law school is a game of who can do the most work without burning out”). Another common theme was feeling inferior to other students, which sometimes held them back in classes (e.g., “My constant worry is thinking I don’t compare to those who are here and how their experiences are better than mine. I am worried to raise my hand in class, afraid that I may say something dumb and be judged for it or will be forever labeled as ‘that girl’”).

A main goal of our belongingness intervention was to provide support to students during a critical period of law school—when they receive their first semester grades. The strong majority of students reported that they benefited from hearing other students’ stories and found similarities with their own experiences (e.g., “It showed that everyone faces difficulties at first. A lot of people said that with time, it gets better. This seems to be a generalized experience and is reassuring.”).

Despite qualitative reports that the intervention was impactful, it was difficult to identify stable effects of the intervention across the three cohorts using our quantitative measures. One potential reason for this is because the three cohorts had vastly different experiences due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, our measures may not have adequately probed the success of the interventions. Throughout this process, we have found that it is difficult to identify measures that capture the success of these interventions. Typically, mindset interventions result in subtle but meaningful changes in attitude over time, which may not be fully captured by quantitative measures in a survey. Additionally, retention rates at Pitt Law are generally high (with or without our interventions), so something like retention cannot be used as an effective measure of success. We also continuously modified our surveys in response to what we learned from students’ experiences, and the unique situations that our students were facing (e.g., changes to the grading curve at Pitt Law; the COVID-19 pandemic). These changes came at the cost of being able to track students’ responses to specific questions over time.

When collapsing the quantitative data across the three interventions, we found that self-reports of mental and physical health were quite low at the beginning of the second semester (around the time of the interventions, when students are getting their first semester grades), and further declined by the end of the second semester. These trends are quite concerning and validate the need to find interventions that successfully support students throughout law school. For the 2020 cohort, who faced the additional challenges of COVID-19 and online learning, we found that their beliefs about their ability to handle future challenges—an integral part of law school—declined throughout the second semester.

Despite the decline in mental and physical health that students self-reported, as the year progressed, our mindset survey data showed that students more strongly adopted a growth mindset (e.g., “You can grow your basic intelligence a lot in your lifetime”). This was a key goal of our belongingness intervention, and we were somewhat surprised to find that the control group also showed an increased growth mindset throughout their first year. Furthermore, although student’s individual growth mindset improved, their beliefs about the institution’s growth mindset worsened throughout the year; even if changes happen at the individual level, an institutional fixed mindset could impede progress.

Future Directions

Based on our conversations with law students and the results of our research, we remain convinced there is an extant need for change. It remains unclear whether our belongingness intervention is the ideal method. As previously discussed, one of our concerns is that our measures do not fully capture the success of our interventions. In the past year, using what we have learned from the first three rounds of data collection, we conducted a final test of our belongingness intervention. In this test, we changed the timing of our approach by implementing the intervention earlier in the first semester. Previously, we implemented the intervention during a period of great stress for students, when they were about to get their first semester grades; we are excited to learn whether adjusting the timing to occur earlier in the year—so that students have more time to adopt a growth mindset—has any impact. We do not expect to find that our intervention can solve all problems for all students—we may need to make considerable modifications (like continued interventions for the second- and third-year students) or adopt a new type of mindset intervention entirely.

Aside from an intervention for 1L students, we are actively engaged in facilitating other changes that can support students throughout their law school experience. We have recorded open-ended conversations with multiple Pitt Law students (2Ls, 3Ls, and recent graduates) about challenges they experienced in law school and how they overcame them. These conversations provided students with an opportunity to reflect upon their transition to law school and frame their experiences in terms of success. We plan to use these recordings to encourage student resilience—either distributed as part of a course curriculum or brief clips that are distributed at significant times throughout the school year (e.g., orientation, when students receive grades, when students are in the process of applying for summer positions). We have also begun conducting more interviews with faculty to convey that they should be first and foremost concerned with supporting students.

There must also be change at the institution level. Last year, we worked with 2L and 3L students to analyze students’ perspectives about the grading curve. A strong majority (74%) of students were in support of abolishing the mandatory curve—many students reported that the imposed curve had negative effects on their mental health and motivation, and that it contributed to a culture of hostile competitiveness. The administration, when made aware of the students’ perspective, brought the students’ concerns to the faculty, who subsequently replaced the mandatory curve with a more equitable grading policy based on a suggested mean. In our most recent survey, we found that among 1L students, support for abolishing the curve was negatively correlated with feeling a sense of belonging within the law school community and beliefs about one’s ability to handle future challenges and keep up with work demands. Not only do these findings echo our concerns about how institutions themselves can influence students’ mindsets, but we also found that students with a stronger individual growth mindset were more in favor of abolishing the curve.

This year, we received a grant to begin expanding our work with faculty. We recently conducted our first workshop with Pitt Law faculty in which we introduced the concept of belonging, growth mindsets, and how to make changes in the classroom to create an environment that fosters a sense of belonging, resilience, and engagement.

Recommendations & Final Conclusions

Over the past few years, we have learned an incredible amount from simply asking students about the challenges and struggles that they face in law school. Our hope is that other law schools and professional programs start to adopt similar programs and initiatives in their own spaces. Asking students about their experiences—instead of guessing—will reveal unexpected concerns and opportunities for growth within a program.

We encourage any interested institutions to reach out to us—we are happy to share what we have learned and are eager to collaborate with other schools. Given the novelty of this work, establishing a consortium or collective of interested programs will be instrumental in sharing resources and findings. As more schools join our efforts, our knowledge about effective interventions and policies will continue to grow. Furthermore, conducting research in professional programs is inherently difficult because of limited sample sizes; coordinating our efforts and sharing data will improve our efforts to understand and improve the graduate student experience.

More generally, we hope that this work encourages a student-focused approach to improving their experiences in professional and graduate programs. The student will always be the leading expert regarding the student experience—their insight has proven invaluable throughout our project. Additionally, we caution that these conversations with students should be ongoing over the years, and similar endeavors must be dynamic and adapt to the changing needs of students.

If you are interested in collaborating with us or have questions about our work, please email Ann Sinsheimer at ans24@pitt.edu.

^[i] This work is explained in part in Ann Sinsheimer & Omid Fotuhi, Listening to Our Students: Fostering Resilience and Engagement to Promote Culture Change in Legal Education, 26 Legal Writing 81 (2022).

From Left to Right: Dr. Omid Fotuhi, Dr. Ann Sinsheimer,
Professor Andrele St. Val, Senior Data Scientist Ciara Willett

June 14, 2023 by gren2380

Janet Stearns

When Does Professional Identity Formation Begin? Lessons in Candor in the Application to Law School

By: Janet Stearns, Dean of Students, University of Miami School of Law

Some law school educators may believe that professional identity formation of law students begins in law school. I argue that it begins earlier…. when an applicant first completes his or her law school application.

The Law School Application Process:

Applicants to law school must recognize the significance of candor in responding thoroughly and honestly to all questions on the application.

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) website addresses this in discussing Ethical Conduct In Applying to Law School. On this website, LSAC explains:

Your submission of an application for admission to law school is your first step in the process of becoming a lawyer. Now is the time, as you take this first, important step, to dedicate yourself to a personal standard for your conduct that consists of the highest levels of honesty and ethical behavior.

Many law schools, including ours, will ask background questions trying to clarify past academic misconduct, criminal history, and any other issues that might impact on character and fitness. The responses to these questions might not keep an applicant out of law school, but some responses might impact on screening for character and fitness and ultimate bar admission. Dishonesty or lack of candor however is a significant issue with significant consequences. Misrepresentation on the application to law school is also a sanctionable offense under our Honor Code.

Amending the Application:

In many jurisdictions, the character and fitness screening process will require students to submit the initial application to law school. In Florida, the Board of Bar Examiners (BBE) speaks to our 1L students in the first month of school about the bar application process. The purpose of this presentation is to encourage early applications and character and fitness screening to the BBE. We quite commonly see a significant number of requests for amendments to law school applications following this presentation, as the BBE explains to students the expectations of candor and the full import of any failure to disclose.

Last year, we published and clarified our policies on Bar Amendments. We wanted to encourage all amendments within 30 days of the BBE presentation. This also helps our admissions office address any significant misrepresentations early in the student’s career.

Students have thirty (30) days from the date of the presentation to amend their law school application. Full candor is expected during this period so that all applications are fully, accurately, and completely updated, and all disclosures are current. All amendments are reviewed both by the Dean of Students and the Dean of Admissions.

The full policy is available on our website.

Inevitably, there are students who surface during their 2L and 3L years with additional amendments, but we have decided to address those with additional documentation and sanctions given the lack of both candor and timeliness in making the disclosures. We are finding many opportunities to teach important lessons of professionalism and candor.

Consequences for Lack of Candor and Failure to Timely Amend:

A student who misrepresents on his or her application to law school may face serious consequences on the path to becoming a lawyer.

For example, In Re Anonymous Applicant for Admission to the S. Carolina Bar, 437 S. C. 1 (2022), Applicant, who uses he/him pronouns, seems to have applied to law school to start in Fall of 2019. He responded “no” untruthfully to the following two questions:

Had you ever been charged, arrested, formally accused, or convicted of a crime other than a minor parking or traffic violation?

Have you ever been subjected to disciplinary action by any of the educational institutions [he previously attended]?

Following admission in 2019, he disclosed that he had been charged as a minor in possession of alcohol. In December of 2020, he then amended his disclosure and more fully explained the charge. In August of 2020, he disclosed a separate altercation with police from a separate incident. In December of that same year, he further amended his application to reveal a traffic ticket. Finally, shortly before being called to a hearing, he made separate disclosure as to a fraternity “prank” that resulted in a fraternity reprimand, which was seemingly never appropriately amended to his law school application.

The South Carolina Supreme Court, in reviewing this entire record together with some troubling LinkedIn social media issues, decided to delay his bar admission one full year. As the court wrote:

In light of the concerning increase in nondisclosures this Court has seen in recent years….today we take the unusual step of publishing our decision in this case while allowing Applicant to remain anonymous. Our goal in doing so is to warn potential law students, law schools, and bar applicants of the serious consequences of nondisclosure and to encourage law school applicants to completely and fully disclose all required information at the time their applications are first submitted.

As this case demonstrates, the consequences of errors and misrepresentations in the law school application, and the failure to timely correct, can significantly impact the future lawyer. I am deeply grateful to Dean Larry Cunningham of the Charleston School of Law for bringing this important case to my attention.

If you have further thoughts and questions, please let’s continue the conversation. You can reach me at jstearns@law.miami.edu. And take this post as an opportunity to connect with your colleagues in admissions so that they can join the conversation on professional identity formation.

Janet Stearns is Dean of Students at the University of Miami School of Law and Chair of the ABA COLAP Law School Committee.

March 16, 2023 by hami3258