SeRiouS Learning Platform: Spaced Repetition Bar Study App

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A law professor from Suffolk, Gabe Teninbaum, has harnessed the research findings on spaced repetition and retrieval to create a bar study app that spaces flashcards and asks for judgments of learning. Teninbaum claims his product, SeRiouS, improves memory retention to 92%. The content is supplied by 600+ flashcards created by law professors on topics most likely to be tested on the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) and in core law school subjects.

SeRiouS is designed to show the user a flashcard and ask the user to report how well he or she knew the answer. The user’s response determines how soon the flashcard reappears – if the user struggled to recall the correct response, the flashcard appears again soon; if the user easily recalled the response, the flashcard will appear less often.

I have not tested SeRiouS and cannot vouch for the effectiveness of the program. However, as it is based on research findings from cognitive science and designed by a law professor very intentionally to incorporate empirically based effective study methods, SeRiouS appears to be a good bet for students studying for the bar exam and even students studying MBE subjects.

Fail Your Way to Amazing Things (Even the Bar Exam)

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Legal educators and law students can borrow some ideas about failure from the corporate world. In a recent article on Forbes.com, Ekaterina Walter examines the nature of “failure.” Failure is a delay, not a definition. In many ways, each failure is a unique opportunity to learn – what didn’t work?

In academic success, I coached many a student grappling with “failing” – failing a test, an important paper, an entire course, failing out of law school, or failing the bar exam. I worked on validating the feelings of frustration, sadness, and grieving in order to transition to the “what can you learn from this” opportunity. Some students couldn’t, or didn’t want to, hear me.

But many students, brave students, recognized the counter-intuitive value in failure, that failing is not defeat, but merely a detour, that sometimes students need to take the long way around to truly learn from trying, not succeeding, and trying again.

For the students who have recently learned that they have not been successful YET on the bar exam, don’t despair. Mourn your loss, but don’t accept defeat.

You haven’t failed. You’ve been given an amazing opportunity to learn from your mistakes. Don’t blow it. Sometimes you have to fail your way to amazing things.

 

Law School GPA, Not LSAT Or Undergrad GPA, Predicts Bar Passage

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In a recent article by Nicholas Georgakoplous, “Bar Passage: GPA and LSAT, not Bar Reviews,” law school GPA was found to have a very strong relation to bar passage compared to LSAT and undergraduate GPA. Further, the learning in small and elective courses seemed to be significant for bar passage compared to mandatory 1L courses, legal education itself was more significant than innate skill level measured by LSAT, and training in legal analysis more significant than memorization. The study found that the bar preparation provider was not statistically significant compared to law school GPA and LSAT.

 

How to Know if You DON’T Know

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We are not good at judging the effectiveness of our own learning. When information seems easy to recall, we develop “illusions of competence” or “illusions of learning” which hamper our true ability to learn. Over-confidence in our learning leads to early termination of studying,  resulting in poor academic performance.

Ways to avoid overconfidence from Annie Murphy Paul’s post at The Creativity Post:

1. Wait a while - hold off a day or two and then check how well you actually know the information by testing yourself after a meaningful delay

2. Put notes and books away – re-reading & reviewing breeds overconfidence; when material seems familiar, we assume we have learned it. Put your notes & books away and recall the information from memory

3. Mix it up - in the real world, we aren’t tested in convenient chunks. Everything comes at you at once. Interleave (mix up your studying) to replicate realistic conditions, to look for patterns, and to better identify information correctly.

4. Gain expertise - beginners are at a disadvantage as knowledge grows more quickly when linked or connected to prior knowledge. Beginners have to learn AND construct prior knowledge at the same time. Beginners also don’t have the expertise to know what they don’t know. What if you can’t gain expertise or do so in a reasonable time frame? Find a mentor.