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Lawstudents20202020
  • Lawyer
20 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

you just don't notice them, because they're not anxiously telling everyone how busy they are

We also spent very little time at the law school. 

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ZukoJD
  • Law Student
24 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

I can assure you plenty of your peers did not need to work hard to get into Canadian law schools and many of them are not working exceedingly hard in law school. It's certainly not the case that "every law student" is working "exceedingly hard". 

A user on the old forum, theycancallyouhoju, used to refer to law school as a form of stress olympics. Essentially, because law school gives people relatively little feedback and you are competing directly with your peers, a lot of students use workload and stress as proxies for doing well. That leads to palpable displays of stress and anxiety from students who don't have the self assurance necessary to just do whatever work they need to do to succeed. I can see how, as a 1L, you would fall into believing that those anxious displays are representative of everyone in your class, but they're not. A significant number of your peers do not find law school all that stressful—you just don't notice them, because they're not anxiously telling everyone how busy they are. 

In any event, you should get out of the habit of comparing your level of effort to achieving a goal with the level of effort someone else requires to achieve the same goal. There is always going to be someone who is able to achieve what you want to achieve with substantially less effort on their part. It is far healthier to accept that and measure yourself relative to your goals. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that. 

I edited my comment after you replied I guess. I don't think every law student is working exceedingly hard, but that the vast majority that I have met appear to be. Perhaps you're right about the stress Olympics distorting my perception of this-that's a good point.

I still don't agree that plenty of people are just strolling through undergrad and into law school in Canada. Admissions requirements are higher than they've ever been and they seem to just keep on rising. I really don't feel like I need to argue that effort would be strongly correlated with a higher GPA and LSAT. Law school applicants are patently aware of this, so they pad their applications with extracurriculars and whatever else they can to distinguish themselves from the pack. I see this all the time. And obtaining additional credentials obviously necessitates more effort than not.  Credential inflation is a real thing, in law and elsewhere: it has likely never been more difficult to get into professional school in this country.

So your pool of people meandering into law school is a subset of the already small pool of increasingly competitive students being admitted into law school. I just don't find your view convincing. 

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Lawstudents20202020
  • Lawyer
10 minutes ago, ZukoJD said:

I still don't agree that plenty of people are just strolling through undergrad and into law school in Canada. Admissions requirements are higher than they've ever been and they seem to just keep on rising.

8 years of post secondary education and I have yet to see any correlation between the time I put into a class and grades. Some topics just come naturally to people, some people are lucky enough all of school comes naturally to them. Many people in advanced degrees fall somewhere between those two categories. 

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reaperlaw
  • Lawyer
13 minutes ago, ZukoJD said:

I edited my comment after you replied I guess. I don't think every law student is working exceedingly hard, but that the vast majority that I have met appear to be. Perhaps you're right about the stress Olympics distorting my perception of this-that's a good point.

I still don't agree that plenty of people are just strolling through undergrad and into law school in Canada. Admissions requirements are higher than they've ever been and they seem to just keep on rising. I really don't feel like I need to argue that effort would be strongly correlated with a higher GPA and LSAT. Law school applicants are patently aware of this, so they pad their applications with extracurriculars and whatever else they can to distinguish themselves from the pack. I see this all the time. And obtaining additional credentials obviously necessitates more effort than not.  Credential inflation is a real thing, in law and elsewhere: it has likely never been more difficult to get into professional school in this country.

So your pool of people meandering into law school is a subset of the already small pool of increasingly competitive students being admitted into law school. I just don't find your view convincing. 

The problem is just the bolded, you are correlating hard work with success when that is not the case for many people. Undergrad is not that hard, there are plenty of people—your peers included—that did not have to work hard to do well enough in undergrad to get into law school. Not of this has changed even if law school admissions standards have gone up.

Some people are just naturally gifted and can achieve top of the class grades whereas some have to work exceedingly hard to get an average grade. There are even more people who fall in the former category who are content to coast to a B+. This is not even considering the sizable portion of law students who are content to coast to a C+/B- average.

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer

I don't get the purpose of the preceeding discussion about effort at all, in the context of whether or why it's bad for Canadians to use the NCA runaround admission requirements.

Yes, some people can get admitted to, and succeed at, Canadian law schools with minimal effort. The relevant point is that that requires people to be reasonably intelligent and competent.

The problem with Canadians going to open admissions (or close enough) law schools abroad is that there is no barrier to entry (no, the perfunctory Law Society requirements don't count--although admittedly there's a legitimate argument that that's where enforcement of standards theoretically should kick in) for a profession involving significant responsibility and impact on people's lives.

Frankly I care about results, not how hard someone needs to work to get them.

Edited by CleanHands
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ZukoJD
  • Law Student
52 minutes ago, reaperlaw said:

The problem is just the bolded, you are correlating hard work with success when that is not the case for many people. Undergrad is not that hard, there are plenty of people—your peers included—that did not have to work hard to do well enough in undergrad to get into law school. Not of this has changed even if law school admissions standards have gone up.

Some people are just naturally gifted and can achieve top of the class grades whereas some have to work exceedingly hard to get an average grade. There are even more people who fall in the former category who are content to coast to a B+. This is not even considering the sizable portion of law students who are content to coast to a C+/B- average.

Not sure that I buy that the proportion of students easily achieving strong stats and admissions remains constant as the rate of acceptance decreases. I suppose this is possible, but it seems more likely to me that as the target gets smaller other factors will come into play to distinguish the pool of applicants, such as effort. You see this pattern in sports for example. As you increase the level of competition the odds you find a player getting by mostly on their natural aptitude decreases. 

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
2 hours ago, beyondsection17 said:

That's very interesting. I'm surprised. What kinds of government jobs are you seeing them hired into?

Both provincial Crown Prosecutor jobs and a wide variety of provincial civil solicitor type jobs.

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ZukoJD
  • Law Student
1 hour ago, Lawstudents20202020 said:

8 years of post secondary education and I have yet to see any correlation between the time I put into a class and grades. Some topics just come naturally to people, some people are lucky enough all of school comes naturally to them. Many people in advanced degrees fall somewhere between those two categories. 

This is a bit of a silly take. If you spent no time studying for your classes you wouldn't be a lawyer. There is definitely a correlation between time spent and grades achieved. I just seem to think that there's a smaller percentage of people who are floating on by than do others here.

To Clean Hands' point though, I think it's a fairly natural reflex to begrudge others getting what you've worked for without having exerted themselves. I understand comparison is the thief of joy and I would love to do away with this sentiment but it's not that simple.

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Lawstudents20202020
  • Lawyer
3 minutes ago, ZukoJD said:

If you spent no time studying for your classes you wouldn't be a lawyer.

This is a bit of a silly take on what I said.

When I say that there's no correlation on time spent that means that I've had courses where I have studied like crazy to get mediocre grades (or in undergrad failing exams) and other classes where I have just skimmed the notes before an exam and walked out with near perfect scores. 

A person can study for hours on a topic and it might just be something they aren't well suited for. Time in the library isn't going to change the fact that they aren't any good at whatever that is. 

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
2 minutes ago, Lawstudents20202020 said:

A person can study for hours on a topic and it might just be something they aren't well suited for.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book that is completely refuted by this one sentence (because he's a hack and an idiot).

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ZukoJD
  • Law Student
1 minute ago, Lawstudents20202020 said:

This is a bit of a silly take on what I said.

When I say that there's no correlation on time spent that means that I've had courses where I have studied like crazy to get mediocre grades (or in undergrad failing exams) and other classes where I have just skimmed the notes before an exam and walked out with near perfect scores. 

A person can study for hours on a topic and it might just be something they aren't well suited for. Time in the library isn't going to change the fact that they aren't any good at whatever that is. 

You’d likely have done worse on your exams where you did poorly had you studied less than you did. Obviously there’s natural aptitude for subjects, but absent that, effort counts. The longer someone spends thinking through something the more likely they are to grasp it, assuming they possess the bare minimum level of intelligence to do so. 

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QueensDenning
  • Articling Student
15 minutes ago, Lawstudents20202020 said:

This is a bit of a silly take on what I said.

When I say that there's no correlation on time spent that means that I've had courses where I have studied like crazy to get mediocre grades (or in undergrad failing exams) and other classes where I have just skimmed the notes before an exam and walked out with near perfect scores. 

A person can study for hours on a topic and it might just be something they aren't well suited for. Time in the library isn't going to change the fact that they aren't any good at whatever that is. 

Considering it's a 2-3 hour exam that determines your whole grade (for the most part), there is a lot of luck that comes into the equation as well.

Last year I got an A in corporate tax and a B+ in Civil procedure. I didn't like tax much, found it boring, skipped almost every class, didn't do readings and reviewed someone else's outline a few weeks before the exam and got lucky. I knew civ-pro like the back of my hand, did every reading and made my outline from scratch. The exam was hard and I misunderstood part of a question - boom B+. Doesn't change the fact that I am much more confident and well versed in civil procedure vs. corporate tax. I've ran away from every tax-adjacent file I've had the opportunity to work on this summer but revised my firm's precedent on post-Hryniak summary judgement and felt confident doing so. Grades don't necessarily demonstrate what you are or are not good at. 

Edited by QueensDenning
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ZukoJD
  • Law Student
17 minutes ago, QueensDenning said:

Considering it's a 2-3 hour exam that determines your whole grade (for the most part), there is a lot of luck that comes into the equation as well.

Last year I got an A in corporate tax and a B+ in Civil procedure. I didn't like tax much, found it boring, skipped almost every class, didn't do readings and reviewed someone else's outline a few weeks before the exam and got lucky. I knew civ-pro like the back of my hand, did every reading and made my outline from scratch. The exam was hard and I misunderstood part of a question - boom B+. Doesn't change the fact that I am much more confident and well versed in civil procedure vs. corporate tax. I've ran away from every tax-adjacent file I've had the opportunity to work on this summer but revised my firm's precedent on post-Hryniak summary judgement and felt confident doing so. Grades don't necessarily demonstrate what you are or are not good at. 

Luck is a factor, but I’m speaking about this in the aggregate. 

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Turtles
  • Law Student
23 minutes ago, QueensDenning said:

Considering it's a 2-3 hour exam that determines your whole grade (for the most part), there is a lot of luck that comes into the equation as well.

Last year I got an A in corporate tax and a B+ in Civil procedure. I didn't like tax much, found it boring, skipped almost every class, didn't do readings and reviewed someone else's outline a few weeks before the exam and got lucky. I knew civ-pro like the back of my hand, did every reading and made my outline from scratch. The exam was hard and I misunderstood part of a question - boom B+. Doesn't change the fact that I am much more confident and well versed in civil procedure vs. corporate tax. I've ran away from every tax-adjacent file I've had the opportunity to work on this summer but revised my firm's precedent on post-Hryniak summary judgement.  

Alternative take: you spent so much time on the minutiae in Civ Pro you struggled to see the forest from the trees, anticipate where the prof was going, and ultimately meandered in your answer, rather than giving the prof a tight answer that emphasized what they most cared about (as evinced by what they emphasized in the course). In contrast, just reading outlines for tax led you to see what the prof emphasizec as most important, get a sense of what to expect on the exam, and not get bogged down by superfluous details or topics that take time away from the bulk of the marks. You also have more time to drill outlines when you don't have to draft them yourself.

It's not an unusual experience. The more you know about a subject area, the the greater number of issues or considerations you'll need to suppress during a 3 hour exam to stay focused on the central issue. Those details can be helpful when time is not too rushed, but can be devastating when they take you away from the core of the writing (incl. taking time away from a later question) or prevent you from answering the big issues in favor of the lesser issues.

Ignorance can be bliss. It can prevent you from going down rabbit holes or reading ambiguity into something unnecessarily. There's some strategy to knowing how much time pressure there will be and deciding your approach to readings/class materials in advance. Some of my best grades (A/A+) were in classes where I did few to zero readings. I wouldn't characterize it as luck. A prof is unlikely to examine something to be worth a material amount of points unless it was emphasized in the course, for which you can glean from outlines (and particularly by comparing outlines over multiple years to recognize patterns).

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sapsipper
  • Law Student

I think maybe part of the disconnect here is that quite a few law students see the effort-reward relationship as being linear (i.e., the more "hard work" I do, the better my grade will be) when really, in my own experience, it's more like a threshold (i.e., putting in enough effort so that you can understand and apply the material), and how quickly someone reaches this threshold largely depends on their aptitude.

It is true that you need to put in some amount of effort to reach this threshold, even if for some people this is a very low amount of effort. But at a certain point, you are just wasting your time on pointless busywork. And it can actually be worse, because we are human beings and need to manage our mental health. I had friends doing way worse than me and yet were putting in significantly more time on things that ended up just burning them out before exams. I think I did the same thing in a couple of my courses and overworked myself, when really I could have done way less and gotten the same, if not a better, result.

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I mean, what is "effort" anyway? It's not in joules. There is no objective metric. Some people think studying 8-10 hours per day is "effort" and anyone who studies less is putting in less "effort" than they are; others think a couple of hours is also "effort". Effort is personal and varies based on your skill and ability.

I think this is the point @Lawstudents20202020 was making and I tend to agree.

Edited by Ryn
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