Academic Success First-Year Programs

First-Year Programs

Students in the classroom During the first year of law school, the Academic Success Program offers assistance to all students to ease the transition to law school and help them learn the basic skills of legal education. The ASP sponsors a series of workshops during the fall semester, focusing on time management, study and learning strategies, classroom preparation, outlining and review, and exam-taking skills. Students are also introduced to concepts of self-regulated learning, including pre-reading strategies, reading strategies and strategies for obtaining assistance. ASP workshops on exam preparation and exam-taking are offered prior to the first semester final exams. These workshops focus on essay-writing, multiple-choice questions, issue spotting, organizational structure and stress management. Students are also encouraged to select appropriate learning strategies to enhance long-term and short-term memory recall, such as the use of mnemonics, note cards, outlining, flow charts, comparison charts and the like. Teaching assistants trained by the ASP faculty are also used to conduct review sessions for every first-year course.

Professor Jim Gray Legal Reasoning I is a two-credit course required for all second-semester, first-year students whose grade point average at the end of the first semester of law school is below 2.0. Legal Reasoning I is also open on a space-available basis to first-year students with grade point averages above 2.0 who desire to work on their legal reasoning skills. Legal Reasoning I emphasizes the process of "thinking like a lawyer" through exercises in case briefing and analysis, issue spotting, rule articulation and synthesis of cases and forms of deductive and analogical reasoning.

Legal Reasoning I coordinates the students' practice in building specific analytical skills with doctrinal issues drawn primarily from their first-year courses. The theory behind this approach is that learning is improved in the contemporaneous doctrinal subject, and the analytical and exam-taking skills are transferable to other first-year subjects.