Law School Academic Support Blog

NECASP Conference Call for Proposals Extended to November 3!

Request for Proposals: Presentations and Scholarly “Works in Progress”

Northeast Consortium of Academic Support Professionals (NECASP) Conference

Friday, December 15, 2023, 11am-3pm ET, in-person and via Zoom

Hosted by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University

 

NECASP will be holding its annual one-day conference this December. We are excited to return to an in-person conference this year, although we will still be including a remote option to accommodate those participants and presenters unable to travel to New York. Our topic this year is ASP Expanding our Reach: Are We Reaching Out and Are We Reachable?

 

Description: In order to adjust to the ever-changing needs of our students, it’s imperative we do a yearly audit of our messaging and our services to our students. So, this year, let’s get together (in person!!!) to discuss ways we can ensure we are reaching out to all of our students consistently and make sure we are accessible to them.

 

We welcome a broad range of proposals –from presenters in the Northeast region and beyond –and at various stages of completion –from idea to fruition. Please note that we may ask you to co-present with other ASP colleagues depending on the number of proposals selected. Our conference will be in-person on the Pace Law campus in White Plains, NY; however, we will have a Zoom option and will consider proposals from both in-person and remote attendees. If you wish to present, the proposal process is as follows:

 

1. Submit your proposal by NOVEMBER 3, 2023, via email to Danielle Kocal at [email protected]
2. Proposals may be submitted as a Word document or as a PDF
3. Proposals must include the following:
4. Name and title of presenter
   b. Law School
   c. Address, email address, and telephone number for presenter
   d. Title
   e. If a scholarly work in progress, an abstract no more than 500 words
5. Whether you will be attending in-person or remotely
   g. Media or computer presentation needs
6. As noted above, proposals are due on October 27, 2023. The NECASP Board will review the proposals and reply to each by November 17, 2023.
   
   
   

If you have any questions about your proposal, please do not hesitate to contact one of us, and we look forward to seeing you at our conference!

 

Information such as hotel blocks and zoom links will be forthcoming. As always, there is no fee to attend this conference.

 

 

 

 

 

2023-24 NECASP Board Members

 

Chair:   Danielle Kocal, Director of Academic Success The Elizabeth Haub School of Law / Pace University, [email protected]

Vice Chair:   Erica Sylvia, Assistant Director of Bar Success & Adjunct Professor of LawUniversity of Massachusetts School of Law, [email protected]

Treasurer:   Stephen Iannacone, Director of Academic Success, Cardozo Law, [email protected]

Secretary:   Elizabeth Stillman, Associate Professor of Academic Support, Suffolk University, [email protected] 

 

Tenure Track Positions at Widener

Widener University Delaware Law School in Wilmington, Delaware, seeks to hire three full-time, tenure-track faculty members to begin July 1, 2024 at the Assistant Professor level. Our primary needs are Academic Success, Civil Procedure, Legal Methods, Property Law and an Environmental Law Clinic Director. In addition, we have needs in other areas, including: Criminal Law, Evidence, and Law & Technology/Intellectual Property. Qualified candidates will have strong academic credentials, including at least a J.D. degree or its equivalent. Candidates should demonstrate evidence of and potential for innovative and impactful teaching, scholarship, and service to the Law School, the University, and the legal profession.  

In its sixth decade, Delaware Law School is ABA-accredited and the first law school in the nation's First State of Delaware. It has civic-minded students and staff and a top-notch faculty featuring some of the most highly regarded teachers, legal scholars, and social change agents in the nation. The large corporate community in Delaware and the varieties of legal practice opportunities in neighboring Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland offer students an unusually rich array of opportunities for experiential learning through internships and externships, a public interest law center, and numerous clinical programs.   

Wilmington and the State of Delaware are great places to live, work and visit. In 2023, Outside Magazine named Wilmington as one of the 15 happiest places to live in the U.S. and Conde Nast named Wilmington one of the nation's best places to visit. Livability.com has named Wilmington as one the nation's top 100 places to live, and Travel & Leisure named Delaware as one the best places to retire. 

Applicants are invited to submit a cover letter, CV, and three references at:  

https://www.widener.edu/employment.

Director of Academic Success and Bar Passage at UNT

The University of North Texas-Dallas College of Law is hiring a Director for the Academic Success and Bar Readiness Program.  Read more about the College of Law here: https://www.untdallas.edu/lawschool/about/why.php

 

Here is a link to the posting: https://jobs.untsystem.edu/postings/77293

Director of Academic Enhancement at Kentucky

THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY J. DAVID ROSENBERG COLLEGE OF LAW invites applications for the position of Director of Academic Enhancement and Bar Success Program. The positon is a full-time, 12-month, non-tenure-track faculty position. Depending on experience, a successful candidate will be hired as an Assistant or Associate Clinical Professor in the Clinical Title Series. 

Qualified candidates must have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school and have successfully passed a bar exam in a U.S. jurisdiction. In addition, at least four years of law practice experience or teaching experience (or a combination) is required. Supervisory or managerial experience is preferred. Required knowledge, skills, and abilities for this position include: 

• Excellent communication, writing, and analytical skills 

• A commitment to developing inclusive teaching practices that engage students from diverse backgrounds. 

• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to work effectively with a range of constituencies. 

• A recognition of the need to properly protect and disseminate confidential and sensitive information. 

• Proficiency in program planning, implementation, and assessment skills, including compiling and analyzing data for statistical analysis. 

Essential functions of the position include: 

• Administer a program of academic excellence and support benefittng all law students, especially those students in their first and second year of study, building off our current successful programming. 

• Facilitate workshops in the fall and spring semesters for 1L students. 

• Advising and coaching students on an individual basis 

• Work closely with other faculty members to provide comprehensive instruction and support including assisting the Assistant Dean of Student Services with 1L Orientation. 

• Design and teach courses that introduce, reinforce, and develop analytical, reasoning, writing, and other critical skills to enable students to be successful in all years of law school and beyond. 

• Advise faculty on topics such as providing helpful feedback, academic advising, bar coaching, and integration of skills and learning strategies into academic coursework and co-curricular efforts. 

• Oversee the Bar Support Program including developing and teaching the bar success courses, supervising additional bar success course instructors as needed to ensure sufficient coverage; coach and support individual students during bar preparation leading up to the exams; design and implement a workshop series for all law students on topics related to the bar, including preparing for the UBE, an overview of the application process/informational session with the Kentucky Office of Bar Examiners and bar skills workshops on the MPRE, MPT, MEE, MBE , and NextGen bar exam. 

• Oversee the relevant program budget(s). 

• In addition, other duties consistent with the overall goals of the Law School, including, but not limited to, serving on law school committees, and teaching other legal writing and/or skills courses that support the law school curriculum, as needed. 

To receive consideration for this position, applicants must apply through the University of Kentucky’s Integrated Employment System at [htps://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/487516] where they can submit a leter of application and resume. Please send any questions to Faculty Appointments Commitee Chair Associate Dean Jennifer Bird-Pollan, [email protected], or by mail at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law, 620 South Limestone St., Lexington, KY 40506-0048. 

The University of Kentucky provides a range of employee benefits to its faculty. There are several healthcare plans available. Faculty are also eligible to participate in the University's retirement plan. Essentially, the University will deduct five percent of your salary and contribute it to the plan of your choice (among several investment alternatives), and the University contributes an additional ten percent to the plan. Several other insurance policies are available to faculty members. We can help you obtain further information on these benefits from Human Resources, or you can go to their website for additional information (htps://hr.uky.edu/employment/working-uk/our-benefits). 

The University of Kentucky is an Equal Opportunity University that values diversity and inclusion. Individuals with disabilities, individuals from minoritized populations, veterans, women, and members of other underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. 

Academic and Bar Support Scholarship Spotlight

1.    Murray, Michael D. (Kentucky), Artificial Intelligence for Academic Support in Law Schools and Universities (SSRN, September 6, 2023). 

From the Abstract:

The current models of verbal generative artificial intelligence (AI)—Bing Chat, GPT-4 and Chat GPT, Bard, Claude, and others, and the current models of visual generative AI—DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and others—can play a significant role in academic support in law schools and universities. Generative AI can help a student learn and understand material better, more deeply, and notably faster than traditional means of reading, rereading, notetaking, and outlining. AI can explain, elaborate on, and summarize course material. It can write and administer formative assessments, and, if desired, it can write self-guided summative evaluations and grade them. AI can translate material into and from foreign languages with a fidelity to context, usage, and nuances of meaning not previously seen in machine learning or neural network translation services. AI also can visualize material using the tools of visual generative AI that literally paint pictures of the subjects and situations in the material that can overcome students’ literacy issues both in the native language of the communication and in the students’ own native languages.

Beyond supporting student learning and academic success, AI can be a democratizing force because it can empower students to begin writing or drawing or painting at a level that their own life experiences and education have not prepared them or enabled them to participate in. AI can empower students to perform creative, artistic, or literary activities related to legal education and law practice at a high level, catching them up to where other classmates would start. First-generation college-goers and graduate students can use the collective knowledge of a large language model to bring themselves to a higher starting point in the process of gaining admission to and finding success in legal education and ultimately in the practice of law.

The current text-based generative AI models in the form of Microsoft’s BingChat, Goggle’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and traditional methods of tutoring and academic support. It does so through the multimodal nature of its skills: AI can explain, elaborate on, and summarize course material; it can interpret, translate, visualize, or reorder parts of the material. AI can evaluate and correct the grammar, spelling, syntax, and style of a piece of student writing, a task which campus writing centers often avoid for pedagogical reasons or simply logistical and resource-driven reasons. AI has become a master translator moving easily from communications in one language and converting them into many languages, and at the same time monitor the grammar, spelling, syntax, and style of the translated work for fidelity of usage in the target language. At the farther reaches, AI can communicate to illiterate and less than fully literate students because several of the current AIs or their close corporate cousins speak the language of images (i.e., visual communication) by generating visuals to illustrate, depict, diagram, or graph a concept. AIs can deliver the gold-standard level of one-on-one, personalized attention for tutoring and support.

Naturally, with this amount of power placed in the hands of faculty and administrators wielding AI tools, there is a commensurate amount of responsibility to use the AI professionally, equitably, and ethically. AI chat bots may sound human and exhibit a noticeable personality, but they are not persons, they are tools. The writing of AI sounds very intelligent, but that is not because the AI itself is highly intelligent, but rather the AI has assimilated and synthesized the intelligent words of tens of thousands of intelligent writers and generated text that appears equally intelligent. But the AI does not think. It does not reason. It does not replace thinking for our students. AI merely has the extraordinary capacity to simulate the output of a reasonable, thinking person. Yet, AI can also assimilate lies, biased content, hate speech, and harmful language and synthesize and generate similar content without discriminating the good and the true from the bad and the harmful. Current textual generative AIs are trained on a large language models that did not evaluate their source material for truth or bias, or fairness or hatefulness, in gathering as much data as possible for the AI to work with. Volume of material was the operating criteria for building large language models, not truth, justice, equity, and inclusion. At the same time, AI has the capacity to collect and run through personal and biometric data, again without thinking because AI does not think. This is an important part of the use experience of these models, and one that needs to be communicated to users who would turn to the AI for truth and correction on a wide range of deeply important topics.

2.    Deo, Meera E., A CRT Assessment of Law Student Needs (and Accompanying Fact Sheet), 125:5 Teachers College Record 1 (2023).

From the Abstract:

Law students of color have been struggling to recover from the heightened challenges they endured during the pandemic. Struggles with food insecurity, financial anxiety, and emotional strain contribute to declining academic success for populations that were marginalized on law school campuses long before COVID. Legislative support is necessary to support students through this era so they can maximize their full potential. The article draws on data from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) to understand law students’ challenges during COVID and consider ways that administrators, legislators, and others can ameliorate their struggles. The article concludes with recommendations for both institutional and legislative solutions to the identified student struggles. Law schools must allocate greater resources to student needs that range from mental health counseling to academic support—and only after first identifying the unique challenges facing women of color and other students traditionally left at the margins. Legislators must recognize that law students, while privileged in many ways, nevertheless need ongoing support to meet their basic needs; they should consider expanding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to cover law students, providing more financial aid and loan forgiveness, and prioritizing rental assistance so that law students can focus on their academic success and reach their full potential as attorneys.

----------------

Posted by:  Louis Schulze, FIU Law

A Note on Academic Support Face Time

When I began teaching in the ASP field in 2007, the most common academic support method involved schools stationing a person in an office near areas frequented by students.  This method sought to capture “walk-ins” when students randomly ventured past the office and realized that a chat with the ASP designate would be helpful.  Although many in the field also met with individual at-risk students regularly, that was a tricky task because most schools lacked formal mechanisms to require or strongly compel at-risk students to participate.

But the field has moved towards a more classroom-based model, with support courses taught by instructors and supplemented with individual meetings.¹  Despite this, vestigial assumptions about the nature of academic support linger, and performance evaluations sometimes anachronistically focus on the degree to which the ASP faculty member’s office is open and bustling with walk-in business.  This assumption about the necessity of face time ignores the reality that remote academic support has many benefits. 

First, institutionally prohibiting remote academic support and presuming that ASP faculty should focus on walk-ins risks watering down effectiveness.  While being available to all students is important, ASP effectiveness needs to be efficient if law schools need the program to “move the needle.”  Spending hours with the student destined for law review, who already has the self-regulation skills to make use of every available resource, means spending fewer hours with truly at-risk students.  Using remote work by appointment to cordon off time for at-risk students allows academic support faculty to focus more on those needing the help. 

Second, the misunderstanding of ASP methods means that those in the field must be in the office, at best, five days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Because so much of ASP work happens outside those hours, with (very) late-night phone calls during bar prep season not uncommon, requiring ASP face time makes a 60-70+ hour a week job even more taxing, ensuring burnout and turnover.

Third, remote academic support helps preserve at-risk students’ privacy.  Because few law schools provide faculty with BigLaw partner-sized offices, meeting semi-privately with struggling students risks putting them in the awkward situation of being spotted by passers-by.  This drives students away and hinders intervention.  Because closing the office door is not a wise practice, a Zoom meeting allows students to position themselves in a place where the conversation can be truly private.  Although there are ways to mitigate or eliminate this problem in an in-person setting, remote meetings can be a tool for accomplishing this, too.

Fourth, remote meetings allow scheduling flexibility that makes academic support more, not less, available to struggling students.  If the in-person 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. model is required, meeting with many students simply is not possible.  Part-time students with jobs often cannot meet until after 5 p.m., and meeting in person with, say, 10 such students a week in the office leaves the academic support faculty member working 9 a.m. – 7 p.m. in-office hours (at best) five days a week.  By contrast, remote meetings open availability to busy students who might otherwise not be available for support.   

Lastly, remote academic support has pedagogical benefits.  Most of my student meetings entail giving feedback to individual students on the exam-like essays they write for my courses required for students in the bottom 20% of the class.  This means going through the essay line-by-line pointing out analytical strengths and weaknesses.  Using Zoom, I can mark up the essay with comments in advance, share that Word doc on Zoom, and go through the comments as both the student and I have our eyes on the same document.  Using the “cognitive think-aloud”² teaching method, I can edit the paper in front of the student live, delete analytically weaker portions, and replace them with stronger points as the student observes.  Then, I can encourage the student to chime in and contribute to the live reconstruction of the analysis.  While the in-person version of this is certainly viable, I have found that the Zoom approach has its benefits.   

None of this is to say that academic support should be entirely remote.  Establishing in-person rapport and trust with at-risk students is key to creating a relationship that fosters student success.  But regular remote work is both feasible and desirable.  At a time when so many excellent academic support faculty are leaving the field due to burnout, and the ratio of advertised positions to available candidates makes hiring nearly impossible, retaining talented ASP faculty is crucial.  Law schools can foster a more humane work environment by encouraging ASP faculty to work remotely two or three times a week.  Doing so will allow schools to attract and retain ASP faculty candidates who can serve their students well. 

Louis Schulze, FIU Law

----------------------

1  I do not mean to suggest that the "walk-in" model is necessarily bad.  For some schools, relying solely on this method is a good fit, primarily those with low academic dismissal rates and strong bar passage.  But schools that academically dismiss more than a small handful of students or whose bar pass rates are not optimal should likely employ more proactive measures to support their students instead of or in addition to the "walk-in" model.

²  Cognitive think-aloud protocols "involve the teacher vocalizing the internal thinking that they employ when engaged in literacy practices or other areas of learning." 

Once Around the Park and Home

There are a number of sources of the phrase, "once around the park and home," according to the Urban Dictionary.¹  I prefer to think it comes from an old Tony Bennett song: Please Driver (Once Around the Park Again).² The song is sung from the point of view of a man who has been dumped and is longing for his usual company around the park.  As Bennett says, "The trees tonight are snowy white. We drove around like this till dawn last New Years Eve."³ But let's be clear: driving around a park is a loop, you are not going to get anywhere new driving in circles, but you will take in the view. 

Just now, I met with a student who came in to chat about their (ungraded) property midterm and wanted me to take a look before the peer review occurred in the next property class.  Luckily there was a grading rubric and a copy of the question for me to follow along with-it has been a good long while since I took property. As I looked over what the professor was looking for and what the student had produced, I saw a large gap. The student had essentially spotted the issues and came to a correct (per the rubric) conclusion about each one but had not (with maybe two exceptions) mentioned any law or used the facts they were given to reach the conclusions.  They explained that they were only hoping to get the "correct answer" to each question. I gently pointed out that instead of IRAC, they had used IC-and that was only because I gave them credit for stating an issue because they had resolved it. On the rubric, 2 points were to each I, R, and C per question, but there were 4-6 points assigned for the analysis-and rightfully so.  Based on what I saw, they had scored badly. 

They were adamant that they knew the material. I agreed that it was more an output rather than input issue (putting law in students' heads is a different thing altogether), but unlike undergraduate exams (and ironically more like 7th grade geometry), they needed to show their work. On the one hand, I could see (but not really assume) that the student understood the class because they reached the correct conclusion, however, since all of our 1L exams are graded anonymously, their property professor would just be surprised entering the poor exam grade and could not know whose exam it was until that moment. On the other hand, it would be a shame to get an unsatisfactory grade on the exam despite knowing the material. It was a question of showing the work, contextualizing the conclusions by analyzing fact and law together, and just taking a minute to slow down and admire the scenery of IRAC as a format.

I showed the student the picture below (I took it this morning on the way to a haircut) and asked if they had ever taken a drive to look at the foliage (it is a very New England thing to do) and they said they had. I asked them where did you end up when you did that? What was your final destination? They couldn't recall but agreed that the drive was worthwhile. I made my "teachable moment noise"-which I can only assume is extremely annoying but unavoidable (sorry-not sorry). I told them that this is mainly the idea of law school essay exams:  you need to state the route (issue), take the best road (rule), and look for the reasons you have taken the trip (analysis). And where you end up is not nearly as important as the road you took and what you saw along the way (the good and the bad).  Getting from point A to point B without taking a detour into the rule and analysis is efficient but will leave you at point C (as a grade). 

 

In other words, the "correct answer" is the journey.

(Liz Stillman)

 

 

 

1. Urban Dictionary: Home James
2. 1954 HITS ARCHIVE: Please Driver (Once Around The Park Again) - Tony Bennett - YouTube,
3. Id. I mean who does not love Tony Bennett?

Academic and Bar Support Scholarship Spotlight

This week in A&BSP scholarship:

1.  Flanagan, Rebecca C. (UMass), Open Books, Better Skills: an Argument for Limited Open Book Exams (SSRN, September 1, 2023).

From the abstract:

Law schools have embraced closed book exams as one response to falling bar pass rates. But due to lack of student expertise in learning and study skills, students focus on memorization as the key to success on closed-book exams. A focus on memorization allows students to avoid building higher-order thinking skills, skills that must be built over time, skills that are essential to success on the bar exam and in practice. By choosing limited open book exams, law professors and law schools minimize the student focus on memorization, and recenter student learning and study on techniques that produce durable learning and proficiency in higher-order thinking skills necessary for success on the bar exam. 

[Posted by L.N. Schulze, FIU Law]

The AASE 4th Biennial Diversity Conference

The fabulous 4th AASE Biennial Diversity Conference finished up Friday at the lovely American University Washington College of Law. It was three days of amazing presentations by our colleagues in ASP and graciously hosted by American. It was welcoming and enlightening.

The theme, "The Choices We Make Matter: Building More Inclusive Spaces for Historically Excluded Communities," was timely and needed. I know the hosts and AASE Diversity Committee are working on posting all the presentations and slides on the AASE website, but they deserve a rest for at least a few days after all the work they put in. Please take a look when the materials are available: you will be awed at what our community has been working on but not really surprised since we already know that we are passionate about our students and their success. 

Community and collaboration were key topics during this conference-and no one does this better than ASP folks. We sat in our discomfort together and peeked around the corner of it to find better ways for our students. No one likes learning more than teachers.

A special shout out to AUWCL's Joni Wiredu, Rachel Gordon, Michael Levine, Sarah Schenkman, Lisa Sonia Taylor, Alisa Lopez, and the AASE Diversity Committee for making this a wonderful conference.  I am sure I missed some names (as one always does when making a published list, or printing a team t-shirt).

(Liz Stillman)

 

Director of Bar Success at New Mexico School of Law

The University of New Mexico is seeking a Director of Bar Exam Success. This is a newly funded  position that will work collaboratively with the as Director of Academic Success.  This is a year-round, regular full-time staff position.  This position will lead our bar success efforts and our preparation for the NextGen Bar Exam. New Mexico is currently a Uniform Bar Exam state and has not yet made a decision about whether to be an early adopter of the NextGen exam.

We are a diverse, multicultural legal community in a majority-minority state.  New Mexico is a beautiful location with an active and diverse legal community.  The University of New Mexico has a strong clinical law program and public service focus.  

We are looking for someone with a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, with experience working in a diverse multicultural community.  Our law school community includes many nontraditional and first-generation law students.

Director of Bar Exam Success – University of New Mexico School of Law

The Director of Bar Exam Success serves law students and alumni by providing academic support and study tools for bar exam success. This position requires robust knowledge of legal theory, analysis and writing, and of academic and other fundamental skills necessary to prepare law students to succeed on the bar exam.  Preferred experience includes academic support, bar exam preparation, teaching law, tutoring, or academic counseling.  To apply, and for full job description, pay and benefits, please see link below. The position is currently open until filled. https://unmjobs.recruiting.com/director-of-bar-exam-success-req-25943/job/25080246

Assistant Professor of Practice at Atlanta's John Marshall

Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School is looking for a motivated individual to join the

school in a full-time, non-tenure track faculty position as either an Assistant or Associate

Professor of Practice (based on experience) and member of the Academic Achievement

and Bar Success (‘AABS’) team.

 

The role will entail working with students and alumni to enhance, develop, and expound

upon the critical skills associated with success in law school and on the bar exam.

AABS offers instruction and assistance in a variety of formats, including one-on-one

counseling, conducting mandatory and nonmandatory workshops, teaching required bar

success courses, and developing specialized course offerings available to all enrolled

students and graduates preparing for the bar exam. The position may have some

weekend responsibilities but generally is a Monday-Friday position.

 

This is a full-time, non-tenure track faculty position with commensurate voting rights.

This position will have opportunities for advancement and renewal, after an interim

period. This is an in-person role, located at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School in

downtown Atlanta.

 

Ideal Experience and Qualifications:

Applicants must have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, excellent academic

credentials, and a demonstrated commitment to working with students to improve their

academic performance. Applicants must have passed a bar in at least one jurisdiction

within the United States. Preference will be given to applicants who have experience

teaching in academic success or legal writing programs and to those who demonstrate

a commitment to long-term student success.

 

Role Responsibilities:

● Provide insight into student progress, develop departmental programming, and

develop data-driven programming.

● Help manage, implement, and facilitate all components of the academic support

program at the law school, including day-to-day activities of academic mentoring

and achievement programming.

● Teach educational workshops to students in the day and evening divisions on

topics, such as briefing, course outlining, and exam performance. Provide

learning strategies and techniques to enhance and leverage the academic skills

that underlie law school success.

● Work one-on-one with students in the day and evening divisions to strengthen

the academic skills of critical reading, briefing, outlining, and legal analysis.

Individual counseling serves all students, with a special emphasis on students

identified as academically at risk.

● Provide written, formative feedback to students on practice problems and/or

exams.

● Help develop and assess the academic success program by collecting and

maintaining data relevant to academic performance.

● Help develop personal action plans for students studying for law school exams

and bar exams.

● Evaluate academic strengths and opportunities for improvement, develop

long-term academic plans, and assist in providing effective instruction to help

leverage optimal student performance.

● Stay current on educational learning theory.

● Pursue bar exam success outcomes and develop subject matter knowledge.

● Perform other duties as needed within AABS.

Atlanta's John Marshall Law School values a diverse workforce and inclusive culture.

We are committed to providing equal opportunities without regard to race, color, religion,

gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital

status, citizenship, disability, or veteran status. We encourage applications from all

qualified individuals. Applicants with disabilities who may need accommodations in the

application process are welcome to contact Director Cynthia Davenporte directly.

 

All interested candidates should submit their letter of interest, a current CV or resumé,

and three professional references to:

Cynthia Davenporte

Director of Human Resources

Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School

245 Peachtree Center Ave., NE, Suite 1900

Atlanta, Georgia 30303

[email protected]

Tenure Track Position at Stetson

Stetson University College of Law is seeking a new Director of Academic Success and Bar Preparation Services. The position is a tenure-track faculty position. Experienced candidates who prefer a nontenure-track role will also be considered. They seek someone with the experience, vision, and passion to lead the program into its next phase. 

Stetson is a wonderful law school community committed to student success from admission to admission to the bar. The Dean and administration are well informed on trends and issues directly impacting student success and the bar exam, and the faculty is supportive and collaborative with the department and works closely with the director.   

As Florida’s oldest law school, we have a rich history and a supportive alumni base. As an added benefit, we have a beautiful Mediterranean Revival-style campus with a lush tropical landscape in Gulfport, a quaint area next to St. Peterburg, and only a short drive to Tampa.

View the complete job posting HERE.

Bar Passage Position at Denver

DU Law is looking to expand the bar passage program with a visiting professor. 

For the details and where to apply, go to this link:

https://jobs.du.edu/en-us/job/496728/assistant-director-bar-success-faculty-sturm-college-of-law

Annual North East Academic Support Professionals (NECASP) Conference-Call for Proposals

Request for Proposals: Presentations and Scholarly “Works in Progress”

Northeast Consortium of Academic Support Professionals (NECASP) Conference

Friday, December 15, 2023, 11am-3pm ET, in-person and via Zoom

Hosted by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University

 

NECASP will be holding its annual one-day conference this December. We are excited to return to an in-person conference this year, although we will still be including a remote option to accommodate those participants and presenters unable to travel to New York. Our topic this year is ASP Expanding our Reach: Are We Reaching Out and Are We Reachable?

 

Description: In order to adjust to the ever-changing needs of our students, it’s imperative we do a yearly audit of our messaging and our services to our students. So, this year, let’s get together (in person!!!) to discuss ways we can ensure we are reaching out to all of our students consistently and make sure we are accessible to them.

 

We welcome a broad range of proposals –from presenters in the Northeast region and beyond –and at various stages of completion –from idea to fruition. Please note that we may ask you to co-present with other ASP colleagues depending on the number of proposals selected. Our conference will be in-person on the Pace Law campus in White Plains, NY; however, we will have a Zoom option and will consider proposals from both in-person and remote attendees. If you wish to present, the proposal process is as follows:

 

1. Submit your proposal by October 27, 2023, via email to Danielle Kocal at [email protected]
2. Proposals may be submitted as a Word document or as a PDF
3. Proposals must include the following:
4. Name and title of presenter
   b. Law School
   c. Address, email address, and telephone number for presenter
   d. Title
   e. If a scholarly work in progress, an abstract no more than 500 words
5. Whether you will be attending in-person or remotely
   g. Media or computer presentation needs
6. As noted above, proposals are due on October 27, 2023. The NECASP Board will review the proposals and reply to each by November 17, 2023.
   
   
   

If you have any questions about your proposal, please do not hesitate to contact one of us, and we look forward to seeing you at our conference!

 

Information such as hotel blocks and zoom links will be forthcoming. As always, there is no fee to attend this conference.

 

 

 

 

 

2023-24 NECASP Board Members

 

Chair:   Danielle Kocal, Director of Academic Success The Elizabeth Haub School of Law / Pace University, [email protected]

Vice Chair:   Erica Sylvia, Assistant Director of Bar Success & Adjunct Professor of LawUniversity of Massachusetts School of Law, [email protected]

Treasurer:   Stephen Iannacone, Director of Academic Success, Cardozo Law, [email protected]

Secretary:   Elizabeth Stillman, Associate Professor of Academic Support, Suffolk University, [email protected] 

 

 

 

Ten Hours

I had a student ask for an appointment to come in and discuss their study strategies. In the email asking for the appointment, they wanted to know if I had time to meet and discuss their, “dismal (by choice) first-month performance.” Yes, I also read that more than a few times trying to decipher what it meant. I offered them a quick sliver of time that very day to come in and set up a longer appointment on a different day, but to hopefully get something jumpstarted in the interim.

They told me that in the first 4.5 weeks of law school, they had worked for about ten hours. Hmm, I asked, is that ten hours a day (troubling because that seems like too much) or a week (too little)? “Total.” I did not gasp out loud (and I am quite proud of that). I asked them if that included the legal writing assignment that had been due the past week, and they said it did, and in fact, they had spent almost two of those hours on the paper. Another deep breath for me…

I asked a series of follow-ups after that revelation:

1. Are you doing the reading?: Sort-of-I am skimming the cases and then we talk about them in class.
2. Are you taking good notes in class?: Not really-It just makes sense.
3. Have you started outlining?: Outlining what?
4. Are you quizzing yourself after class? No.

They asked me if they were doing it wrong and when I said that it seemed to be the wrong choice, they went on to tell me about their undergraduate career that included a prestigious scholarship given to a handful of exceptional students. They told me their undergraduate GPA and how they never really worked hard at academics. I believe it. They seemed quite intelligent and quick to catch on to things. I took another deep breath and told them that law school was going to come and bite them in the ass (yes, I am a crass girl from the Bronx) if they didn’t do the reading, take notes, do practice questions, and start outlining-like right now.  And, I added that my undergraduate GPA from the very same institution was also pretty good.[1]

I explained the Dunning-Kruger effect to them: “a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.[2]” I told them that finding out what you don’t know when it counts towards, or even accounts for the entirety of, a grade is risky, particularly in law school. In classes where there is only one assessment, you will have absolutely no idea whether you are doing it right until it is too late.

Here’s the thing though, I am not 100% certain they needed the standard “how to do law school” menu of tasks. This may not be how they learn best, but their current “method” didn’t seem conducive to the 3.0 GPA the student wanted to have by the end of 1L year in order to move into our hybrid JD program and take their final two years online. In all honesty, I was really alarmed at the idea that after this year, they might be totally remote and have no 3-D peer or faculty reminders that they are not doing the same work-either qualitatively or quantitatively until they face the bar. They seemed like an unconventional learner who was very smart and not yet excited by what they were studying. But that is an excuse that flies in 7^th grade, and not before our Academic Standing Committee.

I didn’t sugarcoat my concern with this student. Gentle cajoling wasn’t going to be an effective process here. I straightforwardly laid out the unnecessary risks I believed they were taking and then sent them a series of Outlook meeting invitations to check in on their progress. We’ll see if they come to anything.

In the meantime, this kind of student prompts me to remind my doctrinal faculty colleagues that the old school one high-stakes summative assessment at the end of a semester is going to be the downfall of otherwise smart students. This will weed out students who need to have their ass (gently) handed to them early on in order to light a fire in them to get the work done as well as those who cannot genuinely succeed.  It is widening the net and letting otherwise good students fall through. We will ultimately lose students who will be world-changers this way. Is this coddling? In the first semester of law school, in particular, it is not. If our goal is bar passage, we need to make sure students can accurately self-assess by modeling what that looks like from day 1.

As for this student, while I am not absolutely sure they need to follow the regular path, I am certain that they will find the path they have taken thus far is unlikely to end in the place they hoped. I only hope I was persuasive in making that point.

(Liz Stillman)

 

[1] Normally, I would never, ever do that, but I got the very real sense that my perceived intelligence would be a factor in whether they deemed my admonitions credible.

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect