Fear & Loathing In December

As of Wednesday night, I have no more reading for any classes this semester. I have one more class remaining where we’ll go through the intricacies of Summary Judgment and a couple of review sessions on Monday and Tuesday and then our first final will be Wednesday. For those who haven’t been to law school, the best way to describe finals is that it’s similar to the scene in that movie “The Paper Chase.” If you haven’t seen it, basically it’s about a guy with really bad 70’s hair (complete with a really bad 70’s ‘stache) who makes it into Harvard Law. Near the end of the movie is a great scene where everyone is cracking under the pressure of preparing for finals. Hotel employees are chased by rabid law students, people are running through the halls of school shouting, and utter chaos is unfolding. In reality, there is no chaos in the halls and if any law students have accosted any hotel employees, we haven’t heard of it. But the outward chaos in the film is a good indication of the inner chaos every first year law student goes through at this time.

Why the big deal? Inexperience for one. None of us have taken a law school exam. We may have taken practice tests, but those usually aren’t graded and they really only show us that law school exam are noting like our undergrad exam. Then there’s fact that, unlike undergrad, law school is competitive. In undergrad, if you get a 95% on the final, you get an A. As Hers pointed out, in law school if everyone else gets a 95% too, that outstanding effort earns you a C. Finally, we all should, in theory at least, be of similar ability. There is no full proof way to evaluate how well an applicant will do in law school, but the best indicator is GPA and LSAT (think SAT for law school wannabes) scores. Everyone here has similar GPAs and LSAT scores meaning we all have an equal shot at success in law school. However, traditionally, we’ll lose about 20 students this semester. Some will drop out, some will simply be asked not to come back. (And if you say no school is going to turn down tuition from a willing student, think again. Albany is trying desperately to improve its ranking among other law schools and one way for it to do that is to raise its bar passage rates. If you’re carrying a D- average, your odds of passing the bar aren’t looking to good and the school would just as soon drop you now to prevent you from dragging the class average down when it comes time to take the bar.)

Now I know some people read this and say that it sounds like I’m stressed and I appreciate the concern. Truth is that I am stressed a bit, but it’s not the ulcer inducing, cold sweets at night kind of stress. It’s the motivating kind of stress that makes you work 12 hours a day to understand “blasted RAP” in hopes that you’ll manage a C or (dare to dream) better on the final.

I now return to my regularly scheduled review of the statute of frauds.

PS-If the typos I've corrected so far are any indication, I should stop blogging after studying all day. At least finals are in the morning.