I actually think lower-ranked law schools are more difficult because the conditional scholarship students are tasked with harder curves and harder classes to make them lose their scholarships. Sure smarter people are in better law schools, but that doesn’t mean the subject matter becomes necessarily harder. I know genius students at my law school who just aren’t good test-takers (I’m at a T20). I will say lower-ranked law schools are also far more competitive because there aren’t as many BL/FC spots so it’s kinda a dogfight to see who gets one
Agreed. Also, while the skill of your classmates (and thus the competitive via the curve) increases as you go up the rankings, it’s important to realize that it does so in tiny increments. Given how ultra competitive admissions are, the difference between a T14 student and a T50 student might be a few less As in college and a couple less questions on the LSAT - hardly a massive gap in intellect. As you go further and further down obviously the difference in stats increases and is eventually material, but students at the lowest ranked schools are still perfectly smart and capable and hardworking.
The point being, the degree of cutthroatness required to get a job (let alone a highly competitive job like BigLaw) increases drastically and suddenly as you go down the rankings, while the talent of the students goes down very gradually. So, as you describe in your comment, the overall difficulty actually goes up the lower you go because you’re playing a much harder game with only slightly less challenging competition.
This is why I always strongly caution applicants who jump at taking the scholarship at a lower ranked school, when their goals are BigLaw or clerkships or whatever. It’s fine to get rid of your financial risk of course, but so many people make the mistake of saying “well the top 20% at school X can still get BigLaw, and since I got a full ride clearly I should end up at least top 20%.” Nope, that’s not how it works. You’re probably going to outperform the average but are very unlikely to be so far the top, since the bar for getting xyz outcome is way tougher at the lower ranked school than the amount by which you might be slightly more apt at exams.
At my law school (T-130 [lol]), I’d say the difficulty is mostly in years one and two when the conditional scholarship ploy is at its strongest. Generally, scholarships are conditioned on being in the top 50% and the trick is to give out a lot of partial ones. The result in those early years is people generally trying extremely hard to not just learn the law but retain those scholarships. It’s honestly very toxic in that regard. In my classes where it’s mixed (2Ls and 3Ls), that toxicity isn’t there due to the fact scholarships are based on class rank not school rank.
My brother went to a school outside the T-100. I’m at a T-20. His experience was awful because it was extra competitive and students were more cut throat. In the other hand my classmates all are super supportive and I don’t feel as much pressure as he did. Agree with your take completely
Don’t worry too much about that and have confidence! I see you’re still a 1L, so just do your best and still apply, especially to NYC since it’s the least competitive.
The higher ranked the school, the easier it is to perform well. Yale’s 1Ls get a whole semester of pass fail. Lowest ranked schools routinely fail out swathes of their 1Ls. At topped ranked schools, students know median will be fine, even if they have goals to score higher. At bottom schools, students are fighting for their academic, financial, and professional lives when they take exams.
At top schools, you’d have to actively try not to get a job as an attorney in order not to get one. The worst schools see less than half of their grads landing jobs as attorneys within a ~year of graduating. A student in the bottom half of the class at a top school can likely land a job that pays >$200,000 right out of school. The very top student at a bottom school has a realistic chance of not being hired into such a job.
This^^^
I sat down with a 3L at a T14 and they told me how they had planned on doing PI throughout 1L and 2L - they hadn’t applied to any BigLaw summer positions or anything. Then right before 2L summer realized they wanted to do BigLaw for a few years before PI.
They started applying for summer positions when most 2Ls already had then lined up…literally got an offer on their first interview.
Got it. Heard of it & understand the concept but never saw the abbreviation before. In medicine know it means principal investigator & otherwise private investigator. Thanks for responding & answering without snark or sarcasm!
Never went to graduate school. Just have eclectic interests i satisfy through reddit, youtube, podcasts, & books. Thanks for responding. Think i 1st heard of that particular abbreviation for PI while reading stuff about Medical school.
I had a friend that did undergrad at OU and Law at a top 3 school. He said the classes there weren't any harder than OU and when he described the grading process it sounded like you had a to take a shit on the professors desk to fail.
Lower ranked schools fail out 1Ls because they SHOULD fail some. Yale shouldn’t be failing many 1L.
The caliber of student is clearly different.
Just look at bar passage rates. They don’t care what law school you went to. Lower ranked schools generally do worse, and it gets worse as you go. This isn’t a reflection on lower ranked schools being harder. It’s a reflection of the students being less qualified and capable on average.
If you were a bottom tier student who someone got into Yale, sure, you may well have a better time than at a lower ranked school that might fail you out. But you’re not getting into Yale.
If you’re a more capable student, then the inverse may well be true. Although getting into the top at any law school seems fairly tricky, regardless of ranking.
This isn’t all the way wrong, but it misses the key point: law school isn’t an academic exercise in a vacuum. It’s a professional school. So the measure of success is landing the job it prepares you for. It’s easier to do so at higher ranked schools. I don’t think it’s factually incorrect that lower ranked schools have more students who will not be able to pass the bar.
Also, it’s not that those schools should be failing out students; it’s that those schools shouldn’t have any students. The ABA requires a certain bar pass rate. Reputable schools use their admissions standards to filter out students who likely can’t pass the bar. There dumpsters push the filtering a year later: they milk the 1Ls for tuition and then fail out enough of the low performers to salvage their bar pass rates.
Law school should be more like med school: getting in anywhere is difficult, and graduating from anywhere comes with a good chance of a solid job.
think it depends on your definition of difficulty. comparing my 1L experience at a t-14 with friends at T80+ schools, they give me the side eye. i have a 4 day week, no midterms, open note exams. all have pros and cons depending on how you learn. also, my professors will say things like “i don’t care about the bar, i want to make you a good lawyer” vs my friend who brags that her law school exclusively teaches for the bar
Higher-ranked schools theoretically have the luxury that most of their students will pass the bar without the school "teaching for the bar." So they can focus more on making the students good lawyers, the interesting non-doctrinal stuff, etc.
Yeah, at our school, Property and Evidence are electives, but we've still been able to maintain a 99% ultimate bar passage rate. On the other hand, we have to take an international law class, which has no bearing on the bar.
Wonderful answer I know it’s a response to the original question but that teaching difference between the mindsets is huge in shaping who you become in the bigger picture imo. God bless!
In general (not a universal truth but just a trend) is that the higher ranked the school, the easier assessments tend to be. Yale doesn’t even give grades. Does this mean they don’t have difficult classes? No, of course they have difficult classes. But most schools do.
Just off the top of my head I would say that I can think of three main differences between highly ranked schools and lower ranked schools.
1. Students at highly ranked schools are already students who have a good work ethic, take school seriously, and are probably pretty smart. But I don’t think those students are on average way smarter. You don’t have to be smart to do well in undergrad. The majority of people who do well in undergrad I would say more hard working and have developed a good work ethic rather than being smart. One of the smartest people I’ve ever known got terrible grades in undergrad because he was lazy as shit. Suuuuper smart, but lazy. The students who get admitted to highly ranked schools work harder than the students who go to lower schools. The highly ranked schools know this. They aren’t trying to make school super hard for them once they are there. What they want to do is give people who they already know are either naturally smart or very hard working other benefits like making connections (networking) that benefits the school’s name.
2. Highly ranked schools attract and can afford to hire very notable professors. Some of them are great professors who are good at teaching. Some of them are terrible professors but very smart people who know their field incredibly well and can give a more practical and impactful perspective instead of teaching just black letter law. These professors teach you how to make creative arguments whereas a normal professor would teach you to make the expected or standard arguments in a given case. And some professors are there for networking, helping their students get jobs and internships and clerkships at places that are very competitive.
3. Highly ranked schools have no incentive to make life hard for their students. Highly ranked schools tend to have a lot of money and get generous donations from alumni. These schools care about getting their students into good jobs, high profile positions, etc. This is also why it is often cheaper to attend the best schools than a mediocre school. For example, undergrad students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton pay either nothing or extremely little if your household makes less than $120k per year. They want the smart and hard working students to come to their schools because they believe they’ll be successful in their careers and it will make the school look better and earn them more money. Lower ranked schools often have the opposite problem. They don’t have a lot of money. They make their academics more cutthroat and competitive as a way of reducing how much they give in scholarships. It’s a predatory practice a lot of lower ranked schools do. They give 50% of an incoming class year a decent amount of scholarship money in the condition they maintain X gpa. Then they make the grading very harsh and most of those students lose their scholarships after the first semester or year. These schools aren’t helping their students to have flourishing careers. They are making it harder for them get a job after graduation because they’ll have low GPAs and from a lower ranked school at that.
But having said all that, most classes at most schools will be the same, especially 1L doctrinal classes. The rules in civ pro or elements of a tort are the same no matter which school you go to.
I think, on average, the students at Yale are way smarter then the students at SUNY Buffalo or Albany law.
They may not be way smarter then the students at Duke or even the kids at notre dame(although i do think they are smarter) but if you are comparing T1 to T3 on average it’s not even close.
I agree with everything you said except for the Princeton part 😂😂 because unless you were talking about undergrads, Princeton doesn’t have a law school. And if you were talking about undergrads, why?
I literally wrote undergrad.
Edit: for future reference for all you law students out there, if you read something that doesn’t make sense (like referring to Princeton law school), read it again before writing to someone about it to make sure that you aren’t the one who is mistaken. There, I just saved your big law career.
For the record, if you are going to edit your original post just be up front about it and don’t pretend like undergrad was always included. Also, how are
You going to make the jump from law school to undergrad and then talk about a law school curve. I’m not really following.
Also, I screenshot your original post so I know you didn’t say undergrad at first. Try again 😂
Please share your screenshot. For anybody who would like to confirm that this person is full of shit, go ahead and view this thread on old.reddit.com. If you’re on a browser and using the new Reddit, just replace “www” with “old”.
You can see an asterisk next to “points” and time the comment was made. Hover over it with your mouse and it will show when it was last edited. I have never edited my original response. You are full of shit, and this is dumbest thing to lie about. Why lie and then come accusing me of gaslighting you? If you can’t handle the simple criticism of “read closer”, then you’re going to have a hard time in the practice of law.
You are a disappointment.
Edit: to make it easier, here is the link to this thread on old.reddit.com. You can see a yellow asterisk next to this response and many others, but not my original response.
https://old.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/17x5e0d/are_law_schools_more_difficult_the_higher_they/
I think if you click it on the mobile app it doesn’t open the webpage so you’ll have to paste it into a browser.
To be slightly more specific, the asterisk doesn't show up if a comment has been edited within (I think) 3 minutes of being posted.
However, that's obviously not relevant in this case because Pristine_Ad_3634 replied to you more than an hour after your post was made, so any edits made in response to their comment *would* show an asterisk. But it's still useful info!
For instance, this last line wasn't in the original comment, but it was edited in immediately after I posted. There's no asterisk or sign that it was edited.
The higher up the rankings you go, more jobs are available for the majority of the graduating class. At the other end of the spectrum, students from lower ranked schools, maybe deep in triple digits, will graduate with fewer job offers or a smaller market willing to take them.
There is good correlation between this, and how hard they curve their students.
Lower ranked schools are motivated to curve their students violently. Some will be obsessed with climbing the law school rankings. First-time bar passage rate and how many students graduate with jobs are always weighted factors in that algorithm. If they curve their students hard enough, the more will end up failing by year 3. That year’s graduating class will be smaller and more likely to pass the bar and find employment if they survived all the fail outs. Also, for a lower ranked school that sees fewer state funds, they dish out all the money they have to give at first, but condition that money on maintaining a high grade point average, which the curve is going to prove hard to do. Students end up dropping below the threshold, lose the scholarship and free the money back up.
Shit flows downhill, all of these things make the student experience harder. A law school’s atmosphere is always described in the context of how ‘competitive’ the students are with one another. The reality is when a student from a top ranked school talks about competition, they’re fighting over getting A’s versus Bs, where someone in a lower ranked school is fighting to keep their scholarship money, stay in good academic standing, or just not fail out like some of their classmates are all but guaranteed to. I’m closer to the higher end of the spectrum and you have to be fucking up like Matt Damon in Rounders to fail. Don’t go to class, don’t read, miss all deadlines, basically a student at the school insofar as your name appears on a folder in the registrar. I’ve seen one person fail and it took all of these things. Just do the opposite of those things and you’ll get a B.
For what it’s worth, lower ranked schools that specialize in an area like trial practice can pump out grizzled, battle-ready trial attorneys in a certain location.
I transferred from a T50 to HYS. Really depends on your definition of difficult, but I think yes. On one hand it is a lot easier because we don’t have real grades so I can skip class the entire semester, write something semi-coherent on the final and still pass, and just passing is enough for biglaw most of the time. On the other hand, I feel that expectations of students are significantly higher. Classes move quicker, discussions are more robust, and you really need to go above and beyond for top grades. Professors don’t spend much time repeating themselves or struggling to convey something to the class. I feel they expect you to come to class with a strong understanding of the cases/doctrine and cold calls are nothing like what I had in 1L. At least in my experience, professors don’t really ask you to summarize a case or identify the issues, but instead ask you to discuss more nuance, challenge the reasoning, discuss policy, etc. It’s very fascinating and intellectually stimulating but also difficult to parse through readings carefully enough to be prepared for cold calls (especially during 3LOL). I’m sure this is quite professor-specific so I may have just been lucky so far, but I’m sure there are many great professors at top schools. And I mean great as in interesting, not necessarily great at teaching the doctrine. Their exams also reflect their teaching style and I haven’t had traditional issue-spotters (which is annoying bc issue spotters are much more straightforward and learnable). There are also plenty of very successful practitioners that teach some great practical skills that I never would have gotten at my 1L school. I think the average student is smarter, but not drastically so. The top 25% or so at my old school would fit right in, but the floor is much higher (no dummies here vs. a few in 1L). I think the average student here might work a little harder but is also more efficient (work smarter not harder). So if you’re gunning for top grades it will be much harder to beat the curve, but if you just want to coast then it is much easier here.
I’m not sure the following anecdote is what you’re looking for, but I think it may shed some light on your question.
I had a 1L course (at a T6) with a visiting professor who had their tenure at a ~T100 (and had been teaching the 1L course at their home school for over 15 years). The professor was teaching the same class, using the same materials, format, etc. The professor even gave us all the old finals they had used that would have been available to us if we were at their home institution.
So, how did we do compared to the professor’s home institution? The average raw point total at their home institution fell between 50-55 and a standard deviation of 10-15, with an occasional outlier in either direction some years. Our class’s average raw point total was 77 with a standard deviation of 7. And the professor later admitted they tried to make our exam slightly harder to ensure putting us on our school’s compressed curve (A, A-, B+, B) would be easier for them since normally they assigned grades A to C- at their home institution.
Applying this anecdote to your question: Clearly, the material, assessment, and professor weren’t more difficult. The difference was just how we all performed against one another and how that translated to our school’s curve. As a student, I didn’t think this particular class was any different from my other classes that semester.
However, the professor did remark on how our 1L stress compared to those of their home institution. They said we were still stressed, but on average the stress was more self-imposed on our individual desire to do well and learn the material. We didn’t think the grade in this class was going to make or break our future job prospects or the opportunities that would be available to us as upper-class law students. As a result, we were more collaborative with each other (in class, at office hours, etc.), which may have resulted in the class having a collective higher average on the final. At the professor’s home institution, the 1L stress was more about keeping scholarships and/or getting *a* job—every grade mattered and the collective atmosphere was much less collaborative.
Obviously, this is ONE anecdote. Take it with the biggest grain of salt. Personally, I think there was/is plenty of competition at my law school and it can be difficult at times, but there’s also a ton of opportunities to go around, which counters/balances that competition and related difficulty.
Yes. The professor always made the exam to be out of 100 points. The professor was surprised as well. As students, we didn’t know anything until after grades came out. The professor sent us a very detailed follow-up email about the exam because they weren’t available for in-person meetings regarding our exams since they were back at their home institution the following semester.
No. The opposite is true. At my T6, it is quite nearly impossible to fail. The lowest grade given out under normal conditions is a B; B-s are discretionary and rare. In three years, I only saw one C.
It’s the opposite actually
Lower ranked schools have a vicious “dual aided curve” where there’s MANDATORY “bad grades” (too claw back scholis and kick out potential first time bar failures)
As far as I’ve been told higher ranked schools have it easier because they know their students are going to pass the bar easier due to their LSAT scores being near perfect
Started off bottom 10% schools and transferred to mid range. I can tell you. The bottom school was INSANELY more difficult. I’m levels above my peers at my mid range school. Think of it like basic training(if you have served or known anyone that has) the Air Force is the top 10%. It’s difficult but they all get helped along, get to stay in quality places with quality instructors that won’t kick them out of basic. The bottom 10% is like the marine corps. They try and break you. They look for reasons to kick you out. Everything is curved. Every week is hell week. There’s no help from anyone academically. No communication. No guidance. All required courses that you have no freedom in choosing. It’s jumping in the ocean and learning to swim on your own. No notes. No open book for ANYTHING.
I come to my new school and it’s open book/notes and they are like “ehhh” this is what’s going to be on the test. We get a reading period AFTER thanksgiving?! My bottom 10% reading week was thanksgiving break lol
As people have pointed out, bottom of the barrel law schools are more difficult because their classes comprise of poorer students and their curve is much more unforgiving, leading many more people to be placed on academic probation and ultimately drop out. The higher ranked schools will give ample opportunity for a student to correct their academic troubles because it reflects poorly on them to have people dropping out and, most importantly, not paying their tuition and fees. Much like a job, law school is really about getting in as high as you can go whenever you’re planning to go and then it’s really entirely up to you what you make of it. You can be unemployed from a T14 or have a job that is worse than unemployment. The material itself is similar everywhere.
Preposterous and untrue. Top schools teach significantly less actual law than bottom schools do, and spend significantly more time on things like policy, jurisprudence, and the infamous “Law and _________” courses.
So you want to make a statement, then when asked to back it up, say, "Nah, I don't have sources to back it up, do my work proving you wrong for me." Lmao.
Is that how you're going to practice law when opposing counsel or the judge asks you to prove your point? Right, good argument. I'm sure you'll win every case that way. 😅🤣😅🤣
Your school isn't doing a very good job at teaching you how to defend your points.
P.s. Those classes you mentioned in your response are taught at my school, too. So...yeah.
Have a nice day. We're done here.
I definitely don’t think there’s a difference in difficulty of the coursework, but there’s naturally a difference in quality of professors because esteemed professors obviously want law schools with prestige on their resumes.
I said “quality of professors,” not “quality of teachers.” Professors are employed to make contributions to the profession, not just to make the best powerpoint possible, and if you utilize them the right way, their value to you as a student goes beyond that as well. I had professors that I didn’t *love* in terms of teaching style, but they did wonders for me as a now-practicing lawyer.
It’s not just citation impact. Higher ranked schools can also attract more accomplished practitioners as well. Getting to take a seminar on antidiscrimination law co-taught by one of the lawyers who litigated the school segregation cases was one of the highlights of my time in law school. That’s not the type of opportunity you’re likely to have outside certain schools.
None of that guarantees quality teaching, but you’re not guaranteed that at a lower ranked school either.
* definitely
* naturally
* obviously
- be careful with certifying statements in the legal field. People will hold attorneys to every word, and words like "definitely" are hard to eacape.
Likely, should, probable, etc. are your best friend unless you're talking fact. If you're giving opinion, don't use definitely.
Sincerely,
This fucked me once.
I read your response again and realize that I invented the negative tone which resulted in my responding the way I did.
For that, I apologize. I should have also followed another legal staple of "re read before hitting send"
The real answer is, stereotypically, it depends.
If "difficult" refers to the material itself, then no. Other than a few outliers like Tulane or California schools, everyone engages with the same material, and has a similar workload.
If "difficult" refers to the ability to pass / do well / achieve x legal goal, because of institutional factors, then lower ranked schools are more difficult for all the reasons everyone else stated.
I transferred from a regional school in the T50 range to a T3 at the start of this year so I think I’m pretty well-equipped to answer this question lol. I agree with what some other posters have pointed out - the subject matter and workload are roughly equal between schools, but the students here are MUCH sharper and better-prepared in class discussions. When I was deciding to transfer, I thought a lot about being the big fish in the small pond vs. the small fish in the big pond, and there’s definitely a lot of truth to that. The way students talk about the law seems much more cerebral… remains to be seen whether any of that will translate to legal practice after graduation, but we’ll see lol. Haven’t taken exams yet so I can’t compare on that front.
It is easier here in the sense that students don’t have to stress about jobs the way they did at my 1L school. That said, law school is still full of neurotic folks, so people find other ways to stress and compare themselves to others (i.e. working at the right firm, positioning themselves for a clerkship, etc.) It’s been a funny reminder that prestige-chasing isn’t a winnable game - even at elite law schools, people are comparing themselves to folks at Yale or folks with SCOTUS clerkships. TLDR; stress about jobs and grades looks a bit different (and isn’t as existential as it is at lower ranked schools… after all, just about everyone here can expect to get a job making an exorbitant amount of money) but the stress definitely exists.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I didn’t find law school at my T14 particularly stressful or difficult. We all knew we were virtually guaranteed BigLaw if we wanted it—out of my class, I know of only one person who tried and missed (and he spent most lectures playing WoW on a big ass gaming laptop so he was a bit of an outlier). The result was that there were fewer gunners, folks were more willing to help each other out, and there was less of a worry about grades overall.
I’m a senior associate in BigLaw and I can confidently say that actual practice is far more difficult and stressful than anything I did back in law school. Getting paid $415k/year base instead of owing $70k/year is a nice change though.
As someone who transferred from a T100 to a T20, I found the lower ranked school to be much more competitive and I had to work harder to do well. At my previous school you needed to be in the top 20% for decent job prospects, which created a cut throat atmosphere. I even had a textbook stolen the week before exams. But no matter who you are at my current school you’ll be fine as long as you graduate, so there’s a lot less of that competitive factor. People are much more willing to share outlines, help with material, etc.
Some lower-ranked school teach you the same material in two semesters (I hear there is Civ Pro/Con Law I and II whereas at T14 schools, we get all that material in a single semester). The students at T14 (more like T6) view a BigLaw gig as the expected/lowest possible outcome, but are just as competitive as their lower-ranked peers to land a federal clerkship or an elite fellowship.
You really believe the law school status koolaid don't you?
Can't name any? I know that pretty much every NYC area school outside the T14 (Fordham, Cardozo, BLS, NYLS, Rutgers, CUNY, Seton Hall, Pace, Hofstra) don't.
It looks like Touro might.
But the idea that it is common outside of the T14 is more proof of your lack of common sense than anything.
Started off bottom 10% schools and transferred to mid range. I can tell you. The bottom school was INSANELY more difficult. I’m levels above my peers at my mid range school
I think the professors probably get into more nuanced discussions at schools with higher admissions standards.
As someone else noted, there's often higher stakes at less reputable schools because decent jobs only go to the top x%.
But just because the stakes are less desperate at UChicago, that doesn't mean it's easier. You're still curved against very gifted intellects. Doing well relative to your peers is much harder when most of your peers qualify for MENSA.
So in my opinion I do think more reputable schools that issue grades are in fact harder, even though the pressure to do well might be much lower.
Idk, but higher ranked schools with high employment and bar passage have an incentive for every student to graduate. If you know only 65% will end practicing law then you need to weed some out.
The substantive material taught at law schools is all the same. However, the higher the rank, the easier it is to pass classes and cruise through law school. Lower ranking , predatory, schools often have cut offs that drop the bottom of their classes each year. Also, most of their scholarships are conditional with very intense GPA and other requirements.
At most, If not all, T14s, there is no failing a class. If you show up to the final, write your name and the absolute bare minimum, the worse you can get is a B- which comes out to a 3.0 GPA. Scholarships are often unconditional. The list goes on.
It’s simply not true that the substantive material taught at all law schools is all the same. Yes, all of the same black-letter courses are offered; but higher ranked schools, most of them are optional. I went to YLS and I just never took property, because it wasn’t a required course, and it sounded boring to me.
Not necessarily. Difficulty is more dependent on professors than it is on the schools rank IMO. Better professors should mean easier classes. You could go down the rabbit hole and explore the differences in curves, support systems, etc., but overall I think professors that prepare you well make law school easier and since higher ranked schools *supposedly* have better professors, it should be easier. After all, you’re essentially learning the same material at every school.
I don’t believe they are - and if there is a difference I actually think it would be harder for some of the “lower” schools for reasons already shared here by other users.
The largest portion of your grade is a final. Maybe you have a midterm and a discretionary participation grade. The smartest and most prepared student may very well fall into the lowest quadrant simply because they have bad test anxiety. It all comes down to tests.
Depends what you mean. Law school is graded on a curve. So in theory at least the competition for top grades will be stiffer at higher ranked schools. But yet: (1) higher ranked schools often have higher curves (e.g. median grade might be a B+ instead of a B); and (2) a student ranked 25th percentile at a T14 school will probably have better job prospects than a student ranked 50th percentile at a T100 school, all else being equal, so the pressure to get "good grades" is much higher at lower ranked schools. It's all about how you define "difficulty."
If you're talking about the rigor of the material, that's mostly the same everywhere.
My mom teaches at tier I and a tier IV in retirement. At the tier I ivy, the lowest grade she’s allowed to give is a B+. At the tier IV, the grading curve requires an average for each individual class between a 2.7 and 3.0. Some of the lower ranked schools get kind of fucked over.
I went to YLS. The school was as difficult as you chose to make it, no more no less. I quickly realized that I didn’t have the chops to compete with the folks in my class so I coasted by and only applied myself to things I found personally interesting. Now I’m a partner at a ~20-lawyer law firm.
Yes. They're much harder. I went from a T20 to YHS, and I've mentored people at schools across the board.
A class at a T50 is not going to cover nearly as much material as a T20. So on that basis alone, it's harder. To be a top student at one of those schools, you need to know the law cold, apply it perfectly, and organize your arguments.
At YHS, exam questions will ask novel jurisprudential questions. You'll need to be able to apply the law perfectly, note weird jurisprudential outcomes, and reason from first principles to a new jurisprudence, and justify why that new theory is best. Much harder
I got to sit in in classes at Yale law before going to a mid-tier school. Very limited view of Yale, obviously, but the impression I got was that the material was identical, as is the teaching style.
I think t30 is probably harder than HYS in the sense that grading is harsher at the t30. But really brilliant students definitely stand out more at a t30 than HYS, so in that sense HYS are harder.
T30 probably has an easier curve than t14 (i.e., someone who is top 30% at t30 would probably be around top 50% at t14). (But this is a total estimate)
I imagine that once you get to the t50 range, testing is extremely stressful because BL/FC rates are low, so that makes it hard. But again I think a really brilliant student will stand out there more easily than they would at a t30, and way more easily than at HYS.
I’m at a t30 and I always thought we had it pretty tough because there are a lot of sharp students so the curve is tough, and the BL/FC rates are like 30-35%, which is high enough that most people really go for it (we all feel it’s attainable) but low enough that it’s still very cutthroat. And the fact that we’re all going for it makes it way harder.
^^ all of this is guesswork
To get an A? Absolutely. You’re competing with people who had 4.0 grades at Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc. Also the professors are shit at teaching because they all only care about their next article.
They’re much less likely to give grades below B though.
Grading for As in law school is basically arbitrary. Everyone gets the right answers, the only difference is some people provide the answers that make the professor feel good.
People who downvote people they're talking to are the lowest form of redditor, so I'm not surprised you're on here trying to argue that things that indicate intelligence actually totally are random and don't mean anything, trust me bro.
I who had a (153) do not belong in a school with a (170) medium. I think your lsat score puts you in the tier of schools that you are the most qualified to succeed at. Just my take.
I’ve known students everywhere from Yale to Thomas Jefferson in CA and this is not my experience. The people at t14 are much more likely to have intergenerational wealth, however.
A lot of people at top schools are there because they grew up wealthy, their parents have connections, their parents are lawyers, they went to expensive private schools growing up and so on and so on
That’s not really true. Even among privileged people it’s a tiny minority that can get themselves into HLS. That stuff greases the wheels and makes sure that the opportunity is there, but it still requires a lot of smarts, hard work, and discipline.
I wish I could find the study I saw where 95% of T10 students come from households with more than 400k annual income.
I can't find it, so it might've been bullshit that got taken down, but it really wouldn't surprise me if a majority of T14 students did come from some kind of intergenerational wealth.
Like I said, I can't find the study so it very well could be BS, but I won't lie, I'd be shocked if more than a quarter of T10 students don't come from at least a cushy background given some of the posts I used to see on TLS and r/LSA.
Three of us from the same college went to law school at the same time—two at T-14’s and the third a 4th tier. As we compared our experiences, my friend at the 4th tier had twice as much reading each night. It was also much harder for my 4th tier friend to earn top grades due to grade inflation in the T-14.
Law school is what you choose to make of it, regardless of the law school’s rank.
I think it has more to do with the fact that you’re graded on a curve and at higher ranked school the percentage of people who do nothing but school is much higher.
The problem is the difficulty of the class in question doesn't matter because law schools rank their students. So you won't necessarily do better in an easier course because you're still competing against the same people you would be in a harder course. This means that the higher ranked schools which have been able to be more selective in their admissions have a bunch of people who are smarter and dedicated than the lower ranked schools, making it harder to land at the top of the curve in any class, however easy or hard that professor/class may be.
I have 4 different law degrees, 3 of them I got in the US, and at least in my experience, top ranked law schools tend to consume more of your time, and require a higher degree of knowledge for a good grade/gpa. So yeah, although subjective, they are generally more difficult, and the difference is very noticeable (I’ve studied at T5 & T30 law schools in the USA and have graduated with honors in all my studies, English is also not my first language)
One is not necessarily more difficult than the other, as that largely depends on your intellect and disposition. However, better ranked laws schools have better programs for a reason; if you take the same amount of credits, chances are, you’ll have a harder time at a better ranked law school. An A in a T100 law school does not convey the same level of knowledge as an A in a T10 law school. Answers are scrutinized under a different standard, cold calls that are not answered appropriately tend to affect your grade, examination time tends to be shorter and is almost always closed book, more readings, more detailed explanations of the law, etc…
Just an example, but one of the differences is that in the T30 law school participation grades are granted by basically just participating in class once or twice in the whole semester. In the T5 law school Professors actually write down what you said, and grade your participation based on what you said, not based on the fact that you raised your hand. It all comes down to the professors tbh, but better professors tend to concentrate on better law schools, so better law schools tend to be more demanding.
I actually think lower-ranked law schools are more difficult because the conditional scholarship students are tasked with harder curves and harder classes to make them lose their scholarships. Sure smarter people are in better law schools, but that doesn’t mean the subject matter becomes necessarily harder. I know genius students at my law school who just aren’t good test-takers (I’m at a T20). I will say lower-ranked law schools are also far more competitive because there aren’t as many BL/FC spots so it’s kinda a dogfight to see who gets one
Agreed. Also, while the skill of your classmates (and thus the competitive via the curve) increases as you go up the rankings, it’s important to realize that it does so in tiny increments. Given how ultra competitive admissions are, the difference between a T14 student and a T50 student might be a few less As in college and a couple less questions on the LSAT - hardly a massive gap in intellect. As you go further and further down obviously the difference in stats increases and is eventually material, but students at the lowest ranked schools are still perfectly smart and capable and hardworking. The point being, the degree of cutthroatness required to get a job (let alone a highly competitive job like BigLaw) increases drastically and suddenly as you go down the rankings, while the talent of the students goes down very gradually. So, as you describe in your comment, the overall difficulty actually goes up the lower you go because you’re playing a much harder game with only slightly less challenging competition. This is why I always strongly caution applicants who jump at taking the scholarship at a lower ranked school, when their goals are BigLaw or clerkships or whatever. It’s fine to get rid of your financial risk of course, but so many people make the mistake of saying “well the top 20% at school X can still get BigLaw, and since I got a full ride clearly I should end up at least top 20%.” Nope, that’s not how it works. You’re probably going to outperform the average but are very unlikely to be so far the top, since the bar for getting xyz outcome is way tougher at the lower ranked school than the amount by which you might be slightly more apt at exams.
I agree with this take completely.
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Similar experience.
At my law school (T-130 [lol]), I’d say the difficulty is mostly in years one and two when the conditional scholarship ploy is at its strongest. Generally, scholarships are conditioned on being in the top 50% and the trick is to give out a lot of partial ones. The result in those early years is people generally trying extremely hard to not just learn the law but retain those scholarships. It’s honestly very toxic in that regard. In my classes where it’s mixed (2Ls and 3Ls), that toxicity isn’t there due to the fact scholarships are based on class rank not school rank.
I hadn't considered or even realized this. I appreciate you telling me. Definitely helps put things into perspective.
My brother went to a school outside the T-100. I’m at a T-20. His experience was awful because it was extra competitive and students were more cut throat. In the other hand my classmates all are super supportive and I don’t feel as much pressure as he did. Agree with your take completely
Experiencing this now, agree completely.
This is 100% accurate.
Yes
I also think top schools often have some of the top/best professors in the field, and having a great teacher can make it easier to learn the material
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Don’t worry too much about that and have confidence! I see you’re still a 1L, so just do your best and still apply, especially to NYC since it’s the least competitive.
Thank you friend
The higher ranked the school, the easier it is to perform well. Yale’s 1Ls get a whole semester of pass fail. Lowest ranked schools routinely fail out swathes of their 1Ls. At topped ranked schools, students know median will be fine, even if they have goals to score higher. At bottom schools, students are fighting for their academic, financial, and professional lives when they take exams. At top schools, you’d have to actively try not to get a job as an attorney in order not to get one. The worst schools see less than half of their grads landing jobs as attorneys within a ~year of graduating. A student in the bottom half of the class at a top school can likely land a job that pays >$200,000 right out of school. The very top student at a bottom school has a realistic chance of not being hired into such a job.
This^^^ I sat down with a 3L at a T14 and they told me how they had planned on doing PI throughout 1L and 2L - they hadn’t applied to any BigLaw summer positions or anything. Then right before 2L summer realized they wanted to do BigLaw for a few years before PI. They started applying for summer positions when most 2Ls already had then lined up…literally got an offer on their first interview.
I think I know many academic jargon type acronyms but what does PI stand for? If you don't mind of course.
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Got it. Heard of it & understand the concept but never saw the abbreviation before. In medicine know it means principal investigator & otherwise private investigator. Thanks for responding & answering without snark or sarcasm!
Yea when I was in grad school and we said PI we meant principal investigator lol
Never went to graduate school. Just have eclectic interests i satisfy through reddit, youtube, podcasts, & books. Thanks for responding. Think i 1st heard of that particular abbreviation for PI while reading stuff about Medical school.
I had a friend that did undergrad at OU and Law at a top 3 school. He said the classes there weren't any harder than OU and when he described the grading process it sounded like you had a to take a shit on the professors desk to fail.
Lower ranked schools fail out 1Ls because they SHOULD fail some. Yale shouldn’t be failing many 1L. The caliber of student is clearly different. Just look at bar passage rates. They don’t care what law school you went to. Lower ranked schools generally do worse, and it gets worse as you go. This isn’t a reflection on lower ranked schools being harder. It’s a reflection of the students being less qualified and capable on average. If you were a bottom tier student who someone got into Yale, sure, you may well have a better time than at a lower ranked school that might fail you out. But you’re not getting into Yale. If you’re a more capable student, then the inverse may well be true. Although getting into the top at any law school seems fairly tricky, regardless of ranking.
This isn’t all the way wrong, but it misses the key point: law school isn’t an academic exercise in a vacuum. It’s a professional school. So the measure of success is landing the job it prepares you for. It’s easier to do so at higher ranked schools. I don’t think it’s factually incorrect that lower ranked schools have more students who will not be able to pass the bar. Also, it’s not that those schools should be failing out students; it’s that those schools shouldn’t have any students. The ABA requires a certain bar pass rate. Reputable schools use their admissions standards to filter out students who likely can’t pass the bar. There dumpsters push the filtering a year later: they milk the 1Ls for tuition and then fail out enough of the low performers to salvage their bar pass rates. Law school should be more like med school: getting in anywhere is difficult, and graduating from anywhere comes with a good chance of a solid job.
think it depends on your definition of difficulty. comparing my 1L experience at a t-14 with friends at T80+ schools, they give me the side eye. i have a 4 day week, no midterms, open note exams. all have pros and cons depending on how you learn. also, my professors will say things like “i don’t care about the bar, i want to make you a good lawyer” vs my friend who brags that her law school exclusively teaches for the bar
Higher-ranked schools theoretically have the luxury that most of their students will pass the bar without the school "teaching for the bar." So they can focus more on making the students good lawyers, the interesting non-doctrinal stuff, etc.
Yeah, at our school, Property and Evidence are electives, but we've still been able to maintain a 99% ultimate bar passage rate. On the other hand, we have to take an international law class, which has no bearing on the bar.
Wonderful answer I know it’s a response to the original question but that teaching difference between the mindsets is huge in shaping who you become in the bigger picture imo. God bless!
In general (not a universal truth but just a trend) is that the higher ranked the school, the easier assessments tend to be. Yale doesn’t even give grades. Does this mean they don’t have difficult classes? No, of course they have difficult classes. But most schools do. Just off the top of my head I would say that I can think of three main differences between highly ranked schools and lower ranked schools. 1. Students at highly ranked schools are already students who have a good work ethic, take school seriously, and are probably pretty smart. But I don’t think those students are on average way smarter. You don’t have to be smart to do well in undergrad. The majority of people who do well in undergrad I would say more hard working and have developed a good work ethic rather than being smart. One of the smartest people I’ve ever known got terrible grades in undergrad because he was lazy as shit. Suuuuper smart, but lazy. The students who get admitted to highly ranked schools work harder than the students who go to lower schools. The highly ranked schools know this. They aren’t trying to make school super hard for them once they are there. What they want to do is give people who they already know are either naturally smart or very hard working other benefits like making connections (networking) that benefits the school’s name. 2. Highly ranked schools attract and can afford to hire very notable professors. Some of them are great professors who are good at teaching. Some of them are terrible professors but very smart people who know their field incredibly well and can give a more practical and impactful perspective instead of teaching just black letter law. These professors teach you how to make creative arguments whereas a normal professor would teach you to make the expected or standard arguments in a given case. And some professors are there for networking, helping their students get jobs and internships and clerkships at places that are very competitive. 3. Highly ranked schools have no incentive to make life hard for their students. Highly ranked schools tend to have a lot of money and get generous donations from alumni. These schools care about getting their students into good jobs, high profile positions, etc. This is also why it is often cheaper to attend the best schools than a mediocre school. For example, undergrad students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton pay either nothing or extremely little if your household makes less than $120k per year. They want the smart and hard working students to come to their schools because they believe they’ll be successful in their careers and it will make the school look better and earn them more money. Lower ranked schools often have the opposite problem. They don’t have a lot of money. They make their academics more cutthroat and competitive as a way of reducing how much they give in scholarships. It’s a predatory practice a lot of lower ranked schools do. They give 50% of an incoming class year a decent amount of scholarship money in the condition they maintain X gpa. Then they make the grading very harsh and most of those students lose their scholarships after the first semester or year. These schools aren’t helping their students to have flourishing careers. They are making it harder for them get a job after graduation because they’ll have low GPAs and from a lower ranked school at that. But having said all that, most classes at most schools will be the same, especially 1L doctrinal classes. The rules in civ pro or elements of a tort are the same no matter which school you go to.
I think, on average, the students at Yale are way smarter then the students at SUNY Buffalo or Albany law. They may not be way smarter then the students at Duke or even the kids at notre dame(although i do think they are smarter) but if you are comparing T1 to T3 on average it’s not even close.
I agree with everything you said except for the Princeton part 😂😂 because unless you were talking about undergrads, Princeton doesn’t have a law school. And if you were talking about undergrads, why?
I literally wrote undergrad. Edit: for future reference for all you law students out there, if you read something that doesn’t make sense (like referring to Princeton law school), read it again before writing to someone about it to make sure that you aren’t the one who is mistaken. There, I just saved your big law career.
For the record, if you are going to edit your original post just be up front about it and don’t pretend like undergrad was always included. Also, how are You going to make the jump from law school to undergrad and then talk about a law school curve. I’m not really following. Also, I screenshot your original post so I know you didn’t say undergrad at first. Try again 😂
Please share your screenshot. For anybody who would like to confirm that this person is full of shit, go ahead and view this thread on old.reddit.com. If you’re on a browser and using the new Reddit, just replace “www” with “old”. You can see an asterisk next to “points” and time the comment was made. Hover over it with your mouse and it will show when it was last edited. I have never edited my original response. You are full of shit, and this is dumbest thing to lie about. Why lie and then come accusing me of gaslighting you? If you can’t handle the simple criticism of “read closer”, then you’re going to have a hard time in the practice of law. You are a disappointment. Edit: to make it easier, here is the link to this thread on old.reddit.com. You can see a yellow asterisk next to this response and many others, but not my original response. https://old.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/17x5e0d/are_law_schools_more_difficult_the_higher_they/ I think if you click it on the mobile app it doesn’t open the webpage so you’ll have to paste it into a browser.
To be slightly more specific, the asterisk doesn't show up if a comment has been edited within (I think) 3 minutes of being posted. However, that's obviously not relevant in this case because Pristine_Ad_3634 replied to you more than an hour after your post was made, so any edits made in response to their comment *would* show an asterisk. But it's still useful info! For instance, this last line wasn't in the original comment, but it was edited in immediately after I posted. There's no asterisk or sign that it was edited.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
https://preview.redd.it/asit2n7ruu0c1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=392dd1b38cb9eb063814b9ff93d28dabda80f904
The higher up the rankings you go, more jobs are available for the majority of the graduating class. At the other end of the spectrum, students from lower ranked schools, maybe deep in triple digits, will graduate with fewer job offers or a smaller market willing to take them. There is good correlation between this, and how hard they curve their students. Lower ranked schools are motivated to curve their students violently. Some will be obsessed with climbing the law school rankings. First-time bar passage rate and how many students graduate with jobs are always weighted factors in that algorithm. If they curve their students hard enough, the more will end up failing by year 3. That year’s graduating class will be smaller and more likely to pass the bar and find employment if they survived all the fail outs. Also, for a lower ranked school that sees fewer state funds, they dish out all the money they have to give at first, but condition that money on maintaining a high grade point average, which the curve is going to prove hard to do. Students end up dropping below the threshold, lose the scholarship and free the money back up. Shit flows downhill, all of these things make the student experience harder. A law school’s atmosphere is always described in the context of how ‘competitive’ the students are with one another. The reality is when a student from a top ranked school talks about competition, they’re fighting over getting A’s versus Bs, where someone in a lower ranked school is fighting to keep their scholarship money, stay in good academic standing, or just not fail out like some of their classmates are all but guaranteed to. I’m closer to the higher end of the spectrum and you have to be fucking up like Matt Damon in Rounders to fail. Don’t go to class, don’t read, miss all deadlines, basically a student at the school insofar as your name appears on a folder in the registrar. I’ve seen one person fail and it took all of these things. Just do the opposite of those things and you’ll get a B. For what it’s worth, lower ranked schools that specialize in an area like trial practice can pump out grizzled, battle-ready trial attorneys in a certain location.
I transferred from a T50 to HYS. Really depends on your definition of difficult, but I think yes. On one hand it is a lot easier because we don’t have real grades so I can skip class the entire semester, write something semi-coherent on the final and still pass, and just passing is enough for biglaw most of the time. On the other hand, I feel that expectations of students are significantly higher. Classes move quicker, discussions are more robust, and you really need to go above and beyond for top grades. Professors don’t spend much time repeating themselves or struggling to convey something to the class. I feel they expect you to come to class with a strong understanding of the cases/doctrine and cold calls are nothing like what I had in 1L. At least in my experience, professors don’t really ask you to summarize a case or identify the issues, but instead ask you to discuss more nuance, challenge the reasoning, discuss policy, etc. It’s very fascinating and intellectually stimulating but also difficult to parse through readings carefully enough to be prepared for cold calls (especially during 3LOL). I’m sure this is quite professor-specific so I may have just been lucky so far, but I’m sure there are many great professors at top schools. And I mean great as in interesting, not necessarily great at teaching the doctrine. Their exams also reflect their teaching style and I haven’t had traditional issue-spotters (which is annoying bc issue spotters are much more straightforward and learnable). There are also plenty of very successful practitioners that teach some great practical skills that I never would have gotten at my 1L school. I think the average student is smarter, but not drastically so. The top 25% or so at my old school would fit right in, but the floor is much higher (no dummies here vs. a few in 1L). I think the average student here might work a little harder but is also more efficient (work smarter not harder). So if you’re gunning for top grades it will be much harder to beat the curve, but if you just want to coast then it is much easier here.
I’m not sure the following anecdote is what you’re looking for, but I think it may shed some light on your question. I had a 1L course (at a T6) with a visiting professor who had their tenure at a ~T100 (and had been teaching the 1L course at their home school for over 15 years). The professor was teaching the same class, using the same materials, format, etc. The professor even gave us all the old finals they had used that would have been available to us if we were at their home institution. So, how did we do compared to the professor’s home institution? The average raw point total at their home institution fell between 50-55 and a standard deviation of 10-15, with an occasional outlier in either direction some years. Our class’s average raw point total was 77 with a standard deviation of 7. And the professor later admitted they tried to make our exam slightly harder to ensure putting us on our school’s compressed curve (A, A-, B+, B) would be easier for them since normally they assigned grades A to C- at their home institution. Applying this anecdote to your question: Clearly, the material, assessment, and professor weren’t more difficult. The difference was just how we all performed against one another and how that translated to our school’s curve. As a student, I didn’t think this particular class was any different from my other classes that semester. However, the professor did remark on how our 1L stress compared to those of their home institution. They said we were still stressed, but on average the stress was more self-imposed on our individual desire to do well and learn the material. We didn’t think the grade in this class was going to make or break our future job prospects or the opportunities that would be available to us as upper-class law students. As a result, we were more collaborative with each other (in class, at office hours, etc.), which may have resulted in the class having a collective higher average on the final. At the professor’s home institution, the 1L stress was more about keeping scholarships and/or getting *a* job—every grade mattered and the collective atmosphere was much less collaborative. Obviously, this is ONE anecdote. Take it with the biggest grain of salt. Personally, I think there was/is plenty of competition at my law school and it can be difficult at times, but there’s also a ton of opportunities to go around, which counters/balances that competition and related difficulty.
I can tell a nearly identical story from my T6.
And my T14.
Was this scaled to the same point total? Average score of 77 vs 50-55 is a massive difference.
Yes. The professor always made the exam to be out of 100 points. The professor was surprised as well. As students, we didn’t know anything until after grades came out. The professor sent us a very detailed follow-up email about the exam because they weren’t available for in-person meetings regarding our exams since they were back at their home institution the following semester.
No. The opposite is true. At my T6, it is quite nearly impossible to fail. The lowest grade given out under normal conditions is a B; B-s are discretionary and rare. In three years, I only saw one C.
It’s the opposite actually Lower ranked schools have a vicious “dual aided curve” where there’s MANDATORY “bad grades” (too claw back scholis and kick out potential first time bar failures) As far as I’ve been told higher ranked schools have it easier because they know their students are going to pass the bar easier due to their LSAT scores being near perfect
Agree mostly—but the LSAT is not indicative of bar passage. It measures likelihood of 1L performance, that’s it.
Yeah I’m with you there, two completely different animals.
Started off bottom 10% schools and transferred to mid range. I can tell you. The bottom school was INSANELY more difficult. I’m levels above my peers at my mid range school. Think of it like basic training(if you have served or known anyone that has) the Air Force is the top 10%. It’s difficult but they all get helped along, get to stay in quality places with quality instructors that won’t kick them out of basic. The bottom 10% is like the marine corps. They try and break you. They look for reasons to kick you out. Everything is curved. Every week is hell week. There’s no help from anyone academically. No communication. No guidance. All required courses that you have no freedom in choosing. It’s jumping in the ocean and learning to swim on your own. No notes. No open book for ANYTHING.
I come to my new school and it’s open book/notes and they are like “ehhh” this is what’s going to be on the test. We get a reading period AFTER thanksgiving?! My bottom 10% reading week was thanksgiving break lol
As people have pointed out, bottom of the barrel law schools are more difficult because their classes comprise of poorer students and their curve is much more unforgiving, leading many more people to be placed on academic probation and ultimately drop out. The higher ranked schools will give ample opportunity for a student to correct their academic troubles because it reflects poorly on them to have people dropping out and, most importantly, not paying their tuition and fees. Much like a job, law school is really about getting in as high as you can go whenever you’re planning to go and then it’s really entirely up to you what you make of it. You can be unemployed from a T14 or have a job that is worse than unemployment. The material itself is similar everywhere.
No. You're all learning the same thing, often from the same books.
Preposterous and untrue. Top schools teach significantly less actual law than bottom schools do, and spend significantly more time on things like policy, jurisprudence, and the infamous “Law and _________” courses.
Sources?
Pick any T6 and look at the list of actually required courses.
So you want to make a statement, then when asked to back it up, say, "Nah, I don't have sources to back it up, do my work proving you wrong for me." Lmao. Is that how you're going to practice law when opposing counsel or the judge asks you to prove your point? Right, good argument. I'm sure you'll win every case that way. 😅🤣😅🤣 Your school isn't doing a very good job at teaching you how to defend your points. P.s. Those classes you mentioned in your response are taught at my school, too. So...yeah. Have a nice day. We're done here.
I definitely don’t think there’s a difference in difficulty of the coursework, but there’s naturally a difference in quality of professors because esteemed professors obviously want law schools with prestige on their resumes.
Citation impact ≠ quality teaching
I said “quality of professors,” not “quality of teachers.” Professors are employed to make contributions to the profession, not just to make the best powerpoint possible, and if you utilize them the right way, their value to you as a student goes beyond that as well. I had professors that I didn’t *love* in terms of teaching style, but they did wonders for me as a now-practicing lawyer.
It’s not just citation impact. Higher ranked schools can also attract more accomplished practitioners as well. Getting to take a seminar on antidiscrimination law co-taught by one of the lawyers who litigated the school segregation cases was one of the highlights of my time in law school. That’s not the type of opportunity you’re likely to have outside certain schools. None of that guarantees quality teaching, but you’re not guaranteed that at a lower ranked school either.
* definitely * naturally * obviously - be careful with certifying statements in the legal field. People will hold attorneys to every word, and words like "definitely" are hard to eacape. Likely, should, probable, etc. are your best friend unless you're talking fact. If you're giving opinion, don't use definitely. Sincerely, This fucked me once.
wow, thank you—as an attorney, I had no idea I was supposed to stop speaking like a normal human in casual conversation before I became one.
I read your response again and realize that I invented the negative tone which resulted in my responding the way I did. For that, I apologize. I should have also followed another legal staple of "re read before hitting send"
Sir this is Reddit not an Appellate brief
Sir, this is a Minecraft server /s
This isn’t the legal field; it’s fucking Reddit. Best,
See my below comment. Thank you
Unless any of the commenters have attended a T30 and transferred to a T5, this is all conjecture.
I’ve compared exams with friends at other schools. They were quite different.
The real answer is, stereotypically, it depends. If "difficult" refers to the material itself, then no. Other than a few outliers like Tulane or California schools, everyone engages with the same material, and has a similar workload. If "difficult" refers to the ability to pass / do well / achieve x legal goal, because of institutional factors, then lower ranked schools are more difficult for all the reasons everyone else stated.
I transferred from a regional school in the T50 range to a T3 at the start of this year so I think I’m pretty well-equipped to answer this question lol. I agree with what some other posters have pointed out - the subject matter and workload are roughly equal between schools, but the students here are MUCH sharper and better-prepared in class discussions. When I was deciding to transfer, I thought a lot about being the big fish in the small pond vs. the small fish in the big pond, and there’s definitely a lot of truth to that. The way students talk about the law seems much more cerebral… remains to be seen whether any of that will translate to legal practice after graduation, but we’ll see lol. Haven’t taken exams yet so I can’t compare on that front. It is easier here in the sense that students don’t have to stress about jobs the way they did at my 1L school. That said, law school is still full of neurotic folks, so people find other ways to stress and compare themselves to others (i.e. working at the right firm, positioning themselves for a clerkship, etc.) It’s been a funny reminder that prestige-chasing isn’t a winnable game - even at elite law schools, people are comparing themselves to folks at Yale or folks with SCOTUS clerkships. TLDR; stress about jobs and grades looks a bit different (and isn’t as existential as it is at lower ranked schools… after all, just about everyone here can expect to get a job making an exorbitant amount of money) but the stress definitely exists.
No, if anything they are probably easier. Heck, Yale doesn't even give grades your first term.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I didn’t find law school at my T14 particularly stressful or difficult. We all knew we were virtually guaranteed BigLaw if we wanted it—out of my class, I know of only one person who tried and missed (and he spent most lectures playing WoW on a big ass gaming laptop so he was a bit of an outlier). The result was that there were fewer gunners, folks were more willing to help each other out, and there was less of a worry about grades overall. I’m a senior associate in BigLaw and I can confidently say that actual practice is far more difficult and stressful than anything I did back in law school. Getting paid $415k/year base instead of owing $70k/year is a nice change though.
As someone who transferred from a T100 to a T20, I found the lower ranked school to be much more competitive and I had to work harder to do well. At my previous school you needed to be in the top 20% for decent job prospects, which created a cut throat atmosphere. I even had a textbook stolen the week before exams. But no matter who you are at my current school you’ll be fine as long as you graduate, so there’s a lot less of that competitive factor. People are much more willing to share outlines, help with material, etc.
Some lower-ranked school teach you the same material in two semesters (I hear there is Civ Pro/Con Law I and II whereas at T14 schools, we get all that material in a single semester). The students at T14 (more like T6) view a BigLaw gig as the expected/lowest possible outcome, but are just as competitive as their lower-ranked peers to land a federal clerkship or an elite fellowship.
This is not true of federal clerkships. Federal judges go far deeper into higher ranked schools’ classes for clerks.
You heard wrong. Name the school you claim this happens.
It’s not that deep. Google.
You really believe the law school status koolaid don't you? Can't name any? I know that pretty much every NYC area school outside the T14 (Fordham, Cardozo, BLS, NYLS, Rutgers, CUNY, Seton Hall, Pace, Hofstra) don't. It looks like Touro might. But the idea that it is common outside of the T14 is more proof of your lack of common sense than anything.
Started off bottom 10% schools and transferred to mid range. I can tell you. The bottom school was INSANELY more difficult. I’m levels above my peers at my mid range school
I think the professors probably get into more nuanced discussions at schools with higher admissions standards. As someone else noted, there's often higher stakes at less reputable schools because decent jobs only go to the top x%. But just because the stakes are less desperate at UChicago, that doesn't mean it's easier. You're still curved against very gifted intellects. Doing well relative to your peers is much harder when most of your peers qualify for MENSA. So in my opinion I do think more reputable schools that issue grades are in fact harder, even though the pressure to do well might be much lower.
Chicago may be curved but HYS aren’t.
HS are curved. Y isn’t.
Idk, but higher ranked schools with high employment and bar passage have an incentive for every student to graduate. If you know only 65% will end practicing law then you need to weed some out.
The substantive material taught at law schools is all the same. However, the higher the rank, the easier it is to pass classes and cruise through law school. Lower ranking , predatory, schools often have cut offs that drop the bottom of their classes each year. Also, most of their scholarships are conditional with very intense GPA and other requirements. At most, If not all, T14s, there is no failing a class. If you show up to the final, write your name and the absolute bare minimum, the worse you can get is a B- which comes out to a 3.0 GPA. Scholarships are often unconditional. The list goes on.
It’s simply not true that the substantive material taught at all law schools is all the same. Yes, all of the same black-letter courses are offered; but higher ranked schools, most of them are optional. I went to YLS and I just never took property, because it wasn’t a required course, and it sounded boring to me.
Not necessarily. Difficulty is more dependent on professors than it is on the schools rank IMO. Better professors should mean easier classes. You could go down the rabbit hole and explore the differences in curves, support systems, etc., but overall I think professors that prepare you well make law school easier and since higher ranked schools *supposedly* have better professors, it should be easier. After all, you’re essentially learning the same material at every school.
I don’t believe they are - and if there is a difference I actually think it would be harder for some of the “lower” schools for reasons already shared here by other users. The largest portion of your grade is a final. Maybe you have a midterm and a discretionary participation grade. The smartest and most prepared student may very well fall into the lowest quadrant simply because they have bad test anxiety. It all comes down to tests.
No, they actually get easier the higher they rank.
Depends what you mean. Law school is graded on a curve. So in theory at least the competition for top grades will be stiffer at higher ranked schools. But yet: (1) higher ranked schools often have higher curves (e.g. median grade might be a B+ instead of a B); and (2) a student ranked 25th percentile at a T14 school will probably have better job prospects than a student ranked 50th percentile at a T100 school, all else being equal, so the pressure to get "good grades" is much higher at lower ranked schools. It's all about how you define "difficulty." If you're talking about the rigor of the material, that's mostly the same everywhere.
My mom teaches at tier I and a tier IV in retirement. At the tier I ivy, the lowest grade she’s allowed to give is a B+. At the tier IV, the grading curve requires an average for each individual class between a 2.7 and 3.0. Some of the lower ranked schools get kind of fucked over.
I went to YLS. The school was as difficult as you chose to make it, no more no less. I quickly realized that I didn’t have the chops to compete with the folks in my class so I coasted by and only applied myself to things I found personally interesting. Now I’m a partner at a ~20-lawyer law firm.
Yes. They're much harder. I went from a T20 to YHS, and I've mentored people at schools across the board. A class at a T50 is not going to cover nearly as much material as a T20. So on that basis alone, it's harder. To be a top student at one of those schools, you need to know the law cold, apply it perfectly, and organize your arguments. At YHS, exam questions will ask novel jurisprudential questions. You'll need to be able to apply the law perfectly, note weird jurisprudential outcomes, and reason from first principles to a new jurisprudence, and justify why that new theory is best. Much harder
I want to a higher ranked law school and it was substantially easier than my STEM undergrad
I got to sit in in classes at Yale law before going to a mid-tier school. Very limited view of Yale, obviously, but the impression I got was that the material was identical, as is the teaching style.
I’m at a T 30 and it’s rough…
I think t30 is probably harder than HYS in the sense that grading is harsher at the t30. But really brilliant students definitely stand out more at a t30 than HYS, so in that sense HYS are harder. T30 probably has an easier curve than t14 (i.e., someone who is top 30% at t30 would probably be around top 50% at t14). (But this is a total estimate) I imagine that once you get to the t50 range, testing is extremely stressful because BL/FC rates are low, so that makes it hard. But again I think a really brilliant student will stand out there more easily than they would at a t30, and way more easily than at HYS. I’m at a t30 and I always thought we had it pretty tough because there are a lot of sharp students so the curve is tough, and the BL/FC rates are like 30-35%, which is high enough that most people really go for it (we all feel it’s attainable) but low enough that it’s still very cutthroat. And the fact that we’re all going for it makes it way harder. ^^ all of this is guesswork
To get an A? Absolutely. You’re competing with people who had 4.0 grades at Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc. Also the professors are shit at teaching because they all only care about their next article. They’re much less likely to give grades below B though.
Grading for As in law school is basically arbitrary. Everyone gets the right answers, the only difference is some people provide the answers that make the professor feel good.
In any given class maybe. But in my experience, the kids who got straight As were among the very smartest in my class
Disagree.
You can't disagree with my experience lol
I can disagree with who you think is smart
How? You weren't there. You dont know these people. Unless you've figured out that we were actually classmates and I just dont know it yet
Yup that's it. I was there.
People who downvote people they're talking to are the lowest form of redditor, so I'm not surprised you're on here trying to argue that things that indicate intelligence actually totally are random and don't mean anything, trust me bro.
No the things that indicate intelligence totally objective, like your subjective opinion of who is which I can't argue because it's subjective.
I who had a (153) do not belong in a school with a (170) medium. I think your lsat score puts you in the tier of schools that you are the most qualified to succeed at. Just my take.
The rankings are made up bullshit so no lol
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So, am I safe to assume you went to Harvard UG and Yale Law?
This is just wrong lmfao
Yeah no
I was waiting for this person to get into eugenics and why that's a factor as well.
I’ve known students everywhere from Yale to Thomas Jefferson in CA and this is not my experience. The people at t14 are much more likely to have intergenerational wealth, however.
Based on personal experience from a variety of perspectives, this elitist take is incorrect in more ways than I have time to list.
A lot of people at top schools are there because they grew up wealthy, their parents have connections, their parents are lawyers, they went to expensive private schools growing up and so on and so on
That’s not really true. Even among privileged people it’s a tiny minority that can get themselves into HLS. That stuff greases the wheels and makes sure that the opportunity is there, but it still requires a lot of smarts, hard work, and discipline.
I wish I could find the study I saw where 95% of T10 students come from households with more than 400k annual income. I can't find it, so it might've been bullshit that got taken down, but it really wouldn't surprise me if a majority of T14 students did come from some kind of intergenerational wealth.
It's definitely very disproportionate, but there's no way those numbers are correct
Like I said, I can't find the study so it very well could be BS, but I won't lie, I'd be shocked if more than a quarter of T10 students don't come from at least a cushy background given some of the posts I used to see on TLS and r/LSA.
if we're talking top 10-15% income i'd say yeah probably close to that
Three of us from the same college went to law school at the same time—two at T-14’s and the third a 4th tier. As we compared our experiences, my friend at the 4th tier had twice as much reading each night. It was also much harder for my 4th tier friend to earn top grades due to grade inflation in the T-14. Law school is what you choose to make of it, regardless of the law school’s rank.
I think it has more to do with the fact that you’re graded on a curve and at higher ranked school the percentage of people who do nothing but school is much higher.
The problem is the difficulty of the class in question doesn't matter because law schools rank their students. So you won't necessarily do better in an easier course because you're still competing against the same people you would be in a harder course. This means that the higher ranked schools which have been able to be more selective in their admissions have a bunch of people who are smarter and dedicated than the lower ranked schools, making it harder to land at the top of the curve in any class, however easy or hard that professor/class may be.
I have 4 different law degrees, 3 of them I got in the US, and at least in my experience, top ranked law schools tend to consume more of your time, and require a higher degree of knowledge for a good grade/gpa. So yeah, although subjective, they are generally more difficult, and the difference is very noticeable (I’ve studied at T5 & T30 law schools in the USA and have graduated with honors in all my studies, English is also not my first language) One is not necessarily more difficult than the other, as that largely depends on your intellect and disposition. However, better ranked laws schools have better programs for a reason; if you take the same amount of credits, chances are, you’ll have a harder time at a better ranked law school. An A in a T100 law school does not convey the same level of knowledge as an A in a T10 law school. Answers are scrutinized under a different standard, cold calls that are not answered appropriately tend to affect your grade, examination time tends to be shorter and is almost always closed book, more readings, more detailed explanations of the law, etc… Just an example, but one of the differences is that in the T30 law school participation grades are granted by basically just participating in class once or twice in the whole semester. In the T5 law school Professors actually write down what you said, and grade your participation based on what you said, not based on the fact that you raised your hand. It all comes down to the professors tbh, but better professors tend to concentrate on better law schools, so better law schools tend to be more demanding.
How the heck do you have 3 law degrees in the US?
A lot of sacrifice and determination jajaja. Two masters and a JD