Importance of Participation of Law Students in the Class

A correlation between a student's oral performance in class and his performance in law school (that is, on his exams) is difficult, if not impossible, to draw. Occasionally, the student who is regularly brilliant in class will write an equally brilliant exam, but it would be difficult to predict these types of correlations.




If the student doesn't understand the question, he could ask for it to be repeated or rephrased, although it would be much preferable to try to state specifically what he does not understand, a response which sometimes can be an answer in itself If he is unprepared, he should so state, although almost all professors will mark this down on the roll and will be sure to strike again. Giving this response will therefore only intensify the pressures on the student during each succeeding class period. The best policy is to take a shot at the question, even if not certain what answer the professor is looking for or what a correct answer would be.

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In addition to helping make a class more interesting, student participation can be a most effective weapon in exerting a benevolent control over the class. It may become evident that a professor is a rapid-fire lecturer, spewing forth facts and theories at a nonstop pace that makes meaningful note-taking a real burden. One property class at the New York University School of Law which was experiencing just such a professor chipped in to hire a court reporter for an hour to see if he could keep up. To no one's surprise, he couldn't. A class can sit and take this treatment, suffering collective finger cramps and severe intellectual indigestion, or it can fight back by raising a number of pertinent questions each period that will force the professor to slacken his pace or to explain the material more fully.

In other instances, it may not be clear exactly what the professor is trying to convey. The natural reaction in such a circumstance is for the student to assume that the fault lies with himself and that if he were brighter he would certainly understand as readily as everyone else in the room. However, it must always be kept in mind that teaching a law class is no easy matter. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his autobiography about spending eight hours in preparation for each one-hour class, even after having taught at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School for several years.19 To conduct a class at a high level takes a great deal of preparation or experience, or a combination of both. Obviously there will be classes for which a professor is less prepared than others, as well as a wide range of levels of ability among professors to communicate clearly to the majority of the class. The student can be quite certain that if he is having trouble understanding the points a professor is making, there are many others in the room who are experiencing the same troubles. It therefore benefits everyone if a student in such instances raises his hand and seeks to have a point clarified. Again, the more specific the student can be in stating what it is he doesn't understand, the better.

As has been stated, participation in class, which can create a certain amount of anxiety in students, has no serious long term after-effects. On the other hand, note-taking, which is the student's central in-class function, can have a most significant impact on the student's law school performance.

One of the casualties of the relaxation or modernization of secondary school and college requirements has been the ability to take notes. In a more traditional academic environment, the student served a long apprenticeship during which he could perfect his note-taking skills, for it often was the case that success in a course depended primarily on feeding back to a teacher on an exam exactly what the teacher had taught, the closer to a verbatim transcript the better. Now, with a premium being put on the ability to write papers or to speculate creatively on abstract exam questions, the ability to take notes is rapidly becoming a lost art. By the time the student arrives at law school, he is likely to be unaware of the value of a set of class notes or to be incapable of producing a valuable set.

What is done in class is not merely a review of what the student reads in his casebook. Not only is the professor likely to bring new material, or additional material, to his presentation of a subject, but on a startling number of occasions what the professor finds in a case or spins out from a case can be beyond the student's wildest imagination. Therefore, unless the student has a reliable photographic memory, he will find it necessary to record what goes on in each class in a written form that will be meaningful to him.

What follows are some suggestions on the mechanics of note-taking, although each student will develop on his own the exact method he finds most successful.

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There are advantages in using a loose-leaf notebook rather than a spiral notebook or legal pads. By the end of the semester, a notebook of class notes has become a priceless commodity to the student. If this body of knowledge is contained in a spiral notebook which must be brought back and forth to class each day, the student is risking the possibility that it will be lost, misplaced, or permanently borrowed, with the entire consequential trauma that can place on a student at that time of year. Pages of notes taken on legal pads can easily tear off and again scatter to places unknown. But if the student has been taking his notes in a loose-leaf notebook, at the end of each day these notes can be slipped out of his general notebook and put in individual loose-leaf notebooks for each course, which can be kept safely in his room. He therefore will never have to carry an entire set of notes out into the cruel world. Also, the loose-leaf method will tend to preserve the notes from the everyday rips, tears, and coffee spills that can mangle a spiral notebook or legal pad by semester's end. And if a fellow student has missed a class and wants to borrow the notes, it is a simple matter to slip the appropriate pages out of the loose-leaf notebook, rather than handing over the entire set and worrying whether it will be ingested by a duplicating machine or held for ransom.

Because of the long-term value of class notes, they should be taken in pen rather than pencil, since pencil notes tend to smear or fade with handling and time. They should be written as legibly and as neatly as possible so that a week after the particular class they are not a mass of hieroglyphics that must be translated before being studied. And the student might want to consider starting each class with a fresh page and writing on only one side of the paper.

Of more importance than the methods of taking notes is what will be included in the notes. After a class period is over and has been followed by additional weeks of classes, the student's notes should be able to spark the main ideas that were presented as well as the supporting details to explain or clarify those ideas. While it is pointless to try to record every word a professor speaks, there is nothing more frustrating than returning to one's notes and discovering that, though legibly written in English, the words and sentences on a page are most decidedly cryptic. The student must therefore find for himself that point at which his notes will be neither unnecessarily wordy nor too abbreviated.

Many students have found a standard outline form to be the most convenient framework in which to develop the notes of a class. If the student can fit the discussion of a class into outline form-with major headings, followed by subheadings, followed by specific supporting points, although with each heading and point perhaps including several sentences or a short paragraph rather than just words or brief phrases-it is likely that the student has intelligently followed the class and has a sound understanding of what went on during that hour. Notes in such a flexible outline style will be an easy form in which to digest the material.

While there is no substitute for one's own notes, at times class attendance might be impossible. On those occasions, the student should borrow a colleague's notes to copy or photocopy. This is an especially tricky business, for the first-year student cannot be certain how well his friends are following a course or how well they are incorporating what went on in class into their notes. If, after copying or studying the notes, he still doesn't have a solid grasp of what transpired during the class he missed, the student should borrow other students' notes until the class has come as fully into focus as if he had been there himself.

The secret to success in class-whether it is in the student's classroom participation or in his personal note-taking is concentration. Unless a professor is one of those rare teachers who can regularly keep a class captivated with its lull attention riveted on him, the student will find that, without a conscious effort to concentrate, his mind will begin to wander away from the subject being discussed. It is all too easy to lose focus on the matter at hand as a lawn mower hums on a playing field on a warm spring day, or as Friday afternoon approaches and the clock seems stuck at 2:50, or as the subject being discussed begins to seem, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, very much like sawdust without butter.

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