Osler's Razor

I find it most interesting that the apparent UT students that commented attacked Baylor instead of speaking to their own accomplishments. Or they personally attacked those that supported Baylor. To give them a bit of their own medicine - I wonder if they have this inferiority complex every time the bar passage rates come out?

I think they're missing the point, really. Even if Baylor did teach to the bar (which I don't think it does), how would that be a bad thing? Clearly, the bar is what you have to know in order to become a licensed lawyer, so how is a test that is supposed to measure your worthiness a bad thing to teach to? Should Baylor avoid teaching things that might be on the bar in favor of what might someday maybe be part of the law?

I know someone from SMU who was debating between taking 2 courses - Intellectual Property or Land Use. I told him to take Land Use because that actually sounded useful and he didn't have a hard science degree, making IP law pretty much a non-option for his future. He told me he was going to take IP anyway, because Land Use was "a bar course" and that was discouraged. Cue my immense confusion.

I have to disagree very strongly with the Baylor student that commented - I think that Negotiable Instruments is very well taught.
 

One of the misconceptions that was commented on by, no doubt, a UT student is that Baylor only gets the students who couldn't get in to UT. Plenty of students at Baylor got in to UT or other more "prestigous" schools if you think the US News rankings are important. I turned down UT because I didn't want to talk about theory and actually wanted to do practice court.
 

I, for one, am quite happy that Baylor prepared me for the Bar...and for practice (be it Criminal or Civil), for working with diverse clients, selecting a jury, facing ethical dilemmas...etc. I mean, if you are training Marines, you don't put them in a knitting class.
 

The UT students are just sweating their mediocre results. As the only recognized top-tier law school in the state, how many years can they be in the bottom half of the state's bar passage rate before people start asking questions? They aren't TSU yet, for sure, but being fifth on the passage rate list doesn't do a lot to bolster a school's reputation...
 

I think Baylor's biggest problem in this area is how small it is. The fact is that we don't have a lot of alumni out there impressing everybody. We have some, but when you only admit 170 students over the year (less than half UT's 400), it's hard to populate the world with people who understand and respect the Baylor system. We also aren't able to publish a lot of journals that attract national attention and respect.

I'm not saying we need to increase our admission size; I just think it's a fact that affects how outsiders view us.
 

I turned down UT because Baylor offered to foot the bill. :)
 

The sad part is that we all know that Baylor is so much more than a 3 year bar review, but there is just no way to express that to people that haven't experienced it.

As a person that got into UT, I will admit that there have been times that I have wished that I chose UT. However, those times are only when Baylor has nearly killed me with stress and I would like a little break and a 3.8 GPA.

I've never doubted that we will be more prepared, especially for litigation, to start practicing law. A high bar passage rate is just a good reward for three long years of hard work.
 

It might be worth considering that many of the top UT students are headed to jobs in non-Texas legal markets.
 

Anon 4:28-- I think that is an excellent point. Probably a much higher percentage of top UT students are headed out of state than Baylor students. I wish that we could change that, and broaden the job options for all of our graduates. I think the CSO is doing some really good things on that front.

Yee, Jeremy M., Ginger H., and Katie-- all good points.
 

I hope I'm not rehashing prior posters and I don't mean to bash other schools.

Standardized exams - even those which are writing-heavy - don't improve K-12 schools because it's simply too easy, when passing is required for teachers to retain jobs, to teach to the lowest common denominator in order to get everyone to pass.

Such does not happen at Baylor.

While I will be the last to compare the bar exam to K-12 promotion exams and the motivation of law students everywhere compared to the utter lack of motivation exhibited by many students in the public school system, the criticism leveled at BLS is not dissimilar to that leveled at even successful public K-12 schools: teaching to a test.

The bar, like promotion exams, is intended to be an exam of minimum competency, not an indicator of individual academic achievement. (The similarities largely end there.) Baylor, however, rather than teaching students strategies to "game" the test, teaches students to shoot for the highest standards of achievement, ethics, and practice.

A coach told me once, "If you shoot at nothing, you'll hit it every time." Maybe I'm ignoring course structures, but aside from the focus on Texas law, Baylor largely ignores the bar exam for classroom instruction purposes, opting to teach students the highest standards of practice. In doing so, bar results simply take care of themselves to a great extent.

Furthermore, with respect to the Texas law focus, you have to teach something in class. Don't Baylor students arguably receive more by comparing how model acts are frequently adopted through the political process into our statutes?
 

I think the fact that Baylor has such a rigorous 3rd year, as opposed to the vacation like 3rd years at most schools have helps us on the bar exam. Through PC we learn to plow through tons of work, organize it, and synthesize it on a level that is much greater than our first year experience, which is as tough as it gets at most law schools. Obviously, a lot of work goes into preparing for the bar, which is a challenge that doesn't seem quite as significant when put in perspective with what we just went through in PC.
 

You're wrong about "teaching to the test" in the K-12 context.

Standardized tests do improve failing schools, because they force teachers/students to meet mimimum standards they weren't meeting before.

Given that student weren't learning much of anything before, teaching them the minimum required knowledge does in fact represents a real, and generally meaningful, improvement.

The only time this criticism would be valid is in regard to a truly superior school. In such a context, teaching to the test would presumably be unnecessary, as students would already have the necessary skills.
 

An interesting factoid: A few years ago, Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA were the top 3 (of 10) schools to pass the California Bar. In New York, for the same year, the top 9 (of 16) schools were all USNWR top 20: Duke, NYU, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Yale, Cornell, Penn, and Georgetown. (I got my info from the USNWR report.)

I feel bad for those kids, thinking they're getting a Top-20 education, when apparently it's really just a 3-year bar review course.