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.