Grades are a funny animal at a school that purports to not have any. I believe I am revealing nothing new when I divulge that here, at NUSL, we have evaluations instead of grades. There are some pretty firmly entrenched ideas on the benefit/downside of evaluations, but before we get into them, it’s a good idea to understand what they actually are.

I was warned ahead of time that professors, in general, use buzz-words at the top of your evaluations that give future employers an idea of how you did in the class. While not a grade, per se, it does not take a genius to figure out the ranking scheme of: outstanding, excellent, very good, good, and so on… An eval starts with some variation of "You wrote a(n) ______ exam." or "Overall, your exam was ______." Fill in the blank with a buzz-word and you have a friendlier system of ranking than you would if professors used, say 3.8 or 2.7. Then, you get a few lines that tell you about your exam – in a way, it sounds like the perfect system: those that don’t want to be ranked can take solace in that they are not, but those that want an idea of where they are in relation to their peers can get a general clue. The system is very humane, as those at the very top or the very bottom don’t have to claw quite as hard, since there is no way to tell if you are number 2 or number 5 in the class, but you do have an idea whether you are in the top 10-15% or so. Of course, guessing, by definition is imprecise, and some professors muddy the issue by refusing to use certain buzz-words (much like that one Philosophy professor in undergrad who thought anything over a B+ had to be a monumental work comparable to that of Socrates -- yes, I am looking at you, Prof. Suits!), but overall the system provides enough granularity to keep those of us with scientific backgrounds happy.

The problem with an unconventional system is that no one else follows it. My biggest worry before coming here was how my transcript would stack up against my peers from other area schools. Imagine being an HR manager and getting fifty transcripts for a given position. You have an hour to whittle them down to the ones you will interview. Will you really take the time to read the transcript that has over twenty evaluations instead of one page of grades?

Thankfully, there are much brighter and better people worrying about this than just me -- and they have solutions. The first thing NUSL has going for it is its extensive co-op employer network. My sheepish apologies about the intricacies of how our "hiring process" works were met with nods of approval and understanding at every interview. The employers that work with NUSL know the system well, and they believe it works. Even more importantly, NUSL has started a slow, methodical shift to make it easier for graduates to get top employment opportunities. In addition to evaluations, upper-level students (starting with my class next year) will get a "grade-like object," as well. Ranging from High Honors, Honors and Pass to Marginal Pass and Fail, these will allow the university to produce a one-page transcript which will give an employer unfamiliar with the NUSL system a way to quickly determine an applicant’s worth. It’s still not a GPA, and it’s not a class rank, but it certainly alleviates some of my fears, and so I thought I would share.

Posted by Leon at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A quick note for those of you applying to schools right now: if you have already figured out how to function on three hours of sleep a night, you are ahead of the ballgame. I, on the other hand, am a slow learner, so I apologize in advance if this particular post is even less cohesive than normal.

So, in absolutely no order, some random thoughts:

LSSC is a four-letter word. This is not a coincidence. This is also as much as I can say before NUSL figures out a way to electrocute me through my own keyboard. Let’s just say that if we add up all the hours my team has spent on this project over the last two weeks, it would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment in at least forty-nine states.

Evaluations (that’s our version of grades) come out tomorrow.

The Giants went into Green Bay and ruined what would have been a perfect Payback-Superbowl for the Patriots. I still can’t say the words Desmond "bleeping" Howard without that "bleeping" in there, and that game was eleven years ago.

The Model Penal Code turns out to not be an ideal that all states should model their penal codes after, since it requires proving a state of mind (recklessness, knowledge or purpose) with regards to each element of a crime. In clearer terms, statutory rape would not be a crime unless the perpetrator was at least reckless in not knowing his victim was under the age of consent. Common-sense suggests that any illegal act with someone under the age of consent should be punishable, regardless of the perpetrator’s knowledge of the actual age of the victim. I’d like to now petition to change the name from Model Penal Code to Impractical Penal Code.

The Uniform Commercial Code is not uniform, in that the states adopt their own versions of it, which differ from each other.

I am starting to feel a little like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Posted by Leon at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember the time in your life when a snow day was a good thing? When did that change?

I am not sure, to tell you the truth, because snow days were still good senior year of high school (actually they were awesome, since they didn’t have to be made up at the end of the year), but now I realize that the classes I miss today will be made up later, and that I must figure out a way to do the research I was going to do at the law library from home, which definitely makes the snow day nothing more than an inconvenient way to start a week. So, using some of that logical reasoning that they test for on the LSAT and then proceed to drown you in during your first year, I am thinking snow days must have gone from good to bad while I was in college. However, I have no way to prove this, as I went to school in upstate New York, where they did not cancel class for mere snow.

While we are on the subject of canceling class because of a little snow, let’s also discuss notification methods. In the good-old days you used to wake up early on days you expected a lot of snow and listened to this device called a radio (if you don’t know what this, don’t worry about it, it was a box that sang songs and gave you news before mp3 players and podcasts). As technology progressed, we moved into watching TV in the morning to see if your school (or something that you could convince your parents looked reasonably enough like your school) was listed. I cannot say that I ever missed a snow day announcement using either of these two methods, so why is it that we needed to change them?

Having gone to bed at 2AM when my first class is not until 10:30AM, I was assured of plenty of sleep. Please note that for a law student, six hours is considered plenty. So, imagine my displeasure at being awakened by a ringing cell phone in the other room at 5:55AM. My hopes for just ignoring it and going back to sleep were dashed when I got a polite elbow to the side, which had the dual benefit of springing me to action and also giving me a preview of what having kids might be like. Reaching the phone just in time for it to stop ringing, I noticed a few things. First, the phone was pink, which made it belong to the friendly elbow and not me. Second, neither the phone nor I knew the number, which means some stranger out there somewhere just moved past Ralph Nader on my list of people I don’t particularly like. I mumbled something I am not about to repeat and dragged myself back to bed. Just as my head hit the pillow, the same phone (which I left in the other room) started to beep to let the entire world know it now has a voicemail. What kind of a (insert your own descriptive adjective here) calls a wrong number and then leaves a voicemail? Deciding the voicemail was not worth another trip out of bed, I closed my eyes. This is when the other cell phone started to ring.

Now, my background is in computers, which means I took some statistics and probability classes in my life, and let’s just say that the odds of two wrong-number calls to two different cell phones that just happen to reside in the same house are well near zero. So, I immediately assume the worst. Someone I know or care about is either seriously hurt or dead. The call is coming from the hospital, or a bystander, or a police officer, or who knows where. I jump out of bed, completing a triple-Salchow or whatever it’s called when you clear the foot of the bed in a manner that likely prevents you from ever having kids and stumble to the phone, while tripping over something that sounds expensive as it shatters all over the floor. I get there just in time to hear a cheerful guy named Bill tell me (via recording) that NU has cancelled classes for the day due to snow. So, that’s nice. My heart-rate returns to normal just in time to receive a text message which also tells me that just in case I didn’t know, school is cancelled. I also received an email (which thankfully did not make noise and so went unnoticed until later), just in case. I guess the carrier pigeon had the flu, so he couldn’t make it.

I bring this long-winded entry to a close by asking a simple question: what was wrong with just putting the school-closing notice on TV? Embracing new technology, we could put it on a website where everyone could see it before heading in to school. What exactly is the benefit of treating a snowstorm as if the world is ending? I already know the downside.

Posted by Leon at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This may surprise no one except me, but it turns out that my posts have been getting themselves categorized (look to the left and below this post). This is a neat trick, indeed! In fact, I am currently procrastinating from doing my homework for tomorrow so I can figure out a way to feed my class notes through whatever magical process makes this happen and have an outline come out the other end. I also couldn’t help but notice that my last mini-rant about being recalled form vacation for LSSC work and the fact that New Jersey ate my windshield was classified as diversity, which seemed strange until I realized that this was actually a gift. This leaves me with only two categories that I have not written about before I run the proverbial table.

The first is co-op. NUSL requires all its students to work four 11-week sessions during the course of their three years here. This concept was actually familiar to me, because my undergraduate institution had a co-op program as well. Besides providing a way to gain invaluable experience in the legal profession while still in school, the presence of this program and the connections the university has made with employers all over the country also helps lessen the impact of being at a school without letter-grades or class-rank and competing with students from schools that have both. In a way it allows us to have the best of both worlds: a more collaborative education while retaining the ability to compete for the top jobs.

The second is public interest. NU has a public interest requirement, and I am told that this can be accomplished either via co-op or through a clinical class. An important thing to keep in mind is that you do not have to have a deep-rooted interest in helping the public to come here (I certainly did not have one). Nor do you have to leave here and go work at a public defender’s office in order to be considered a "good person." Loans, career goals, interests (or lack thereof) and other factors may keep you from ever accepting a job that directly helps those less fortunate. However, with the benefit of an NU legal education you will have taken some of that public interest mentality with you wherever you go – and this will make you a better lawyer, regardless of who you work for and represent, and dare I say a better person.

So, that’s that – now the magic happens, and the categories get all filled-in and then there is much rejoicing -- an excellent way to start semester two of year one.

Oh, and: Go Pats!

Posted by Leon at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Choosing a law school is serious business. Quality of education, career prospects, interests of faculty and fellow students all play a role. Having just completed my first assignment for the "Spring" semester, may I humbly suggest that the length of winter break should also play a role in any decision? I realize this may put NU at a disadvantage, with a rather scant fourteen day break, but I am not here to recruit anyone to the institution I call home; I just report on what life is like inside its walls. I am also a bit miffed, to say the least, that it was not Crim or Constitution or Contracts that summoned me back to school exactly two weeks after the remnants of my brain were squeezed dry during my last final of the first semester. The culprit was instead LSSC, with a research plan to contemplate and execute and committees to form and "working rules" to re-establish. For those of us who have spent some time in the real world between undergrad and here – it is all a little too reminiscent of corporate team-building sessions – and that places us all a little too close to "trust falls with Ned from accounting."

Random notes from break (in no particular order):
1. The state of New Jersey owes me a windshield, as while I was traversing that magnificent stretch of parking lot known as the New Jersey Turnpike, an SUV the size of a small house kicked up what I can only assume was a rock of Martian origins directly into my windshield. Not only did this rock cause a crater which will require the windshield’s replacement, but it also obscured my view of the beautiful petrochemical refinery plants along the highway, and that is simply criminal.
2. There is no justifiable reason to show me a Jets game (even in NJ), when the Patriots are playing the Dolphins, their undefeated season is on the line, some records can be broken and the Jets are statistically eliminated from the playoffs until 2012 or so. None. I will not be swayed on this.
3. It’s good to feel human again, even if it’s only for two weeks.

And in case you are wondering what I was doing in New Jersey for a part of my break… let’s just say that married life is full of compromises.

Posted by Leon at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)