Legal Village

Diversity, plagiarism and bad teaching in law schools

Posted 7/11/2007 by Mike Semple Piggot

This week I am looking at a number of issues in relation to legal education, sketching out themes for more detailed analysis in later posts. I start with bad teaching in law schools.

On the principle that I am reasonably likely to find information on legal education and law on the growing number of blogs written by law students, I visited quite a few student blogs last weekend seeking inspiration for my “Charon QC” blog. I came across a most interesting piece by blogger Legal Lass. Legal Lass was grumbling about her BVC tutors wasting time in seminars but it was this paragraph, which I have reproduced in full, that caught my eye:

“Also, it does not instill any confidence in tutors to have them read everything they are supposed to tell us from a pre-planned tutorial sheet; especially things like “from this lesson you have learnt the following…”. It is especially bad if the tutor doesn’t look up once as they are reading and speaks either in a bored or slightly hysterical tone.”

Frankly, it is depressing to hear that this nonsense is going on in a vocational law school. This reminds me of the old days of rote learning and is unacceptable in this day and age. I accept the need to ensure a degree of consistency across a student cohort, or even between campuses, in terms of content, structure and teaching so that all students are given access to the course syllabus, but this is taking formula teaching to a new level of absurdity.

Over the last few years I have received several emails with a repeating refrain that LPC and BVC teaching is formulaic and too highly structured; the tutors programmed to drill students in what is necessary for the examination. This approach to teaching on any course - let alone a course designed for practitioners of the future - cannot be right. I agree with Legal Lass and would have little confidence in, and even less enthusiasm for, classes conducted by a teacher who simply followed a script.

Diversity awaits us…
Or rather, we await diversity. Lord Neuberger will be reporting soon on the issue of diversity; seeking ways to ‘level the playing field’ and encourage those from less privileged backgrounds to pursue a career in law. What do we really mean by the term ‘diversity’? We shall have to wait and see what Neuberger prescribes for us. But, at the end of the day, any proposals on diversity in terms of entry to the profession will have to focus on cost.

One of the practical problems - and I accept it is only one of the problems - is the issue of cost. Tuition fees at university for a degree programme have risen to £3,000 a year but the wall gets even higher at the vocational stage, when fees rise significantly. Fees range from £12,700 for the BVC and £10,700 for the LPC at BPP in London down to £8,600 (BVC) and £7,550 (LPC) at The Bristol Institute of Legal Practice. Living costs will vary but it seems not unreasonable to budget £10,000. A law student could therefore find their first day in chambers or at a law firm begins with a debt burden of £35,000 or more.

Students fortunate enough to be sponsored by a law firm or able to draw on family or their own resources to cover the costs will tend to come, although not always, from more privileged or middle class backgrounds. It is still possible to work one’s way through law school. Indeed, I dug graves to pay for the pleasures in life when I read law 25 or more years ago. But it is more difficult to combine law studies with a job these days, given the pressures on students at university or a vocational law school to secure high grades. Scholarships can only go so far.

The SRA and BSB are doing ‘root and branch’ reviews of the vocational course structure at the moment and change is on the way. Perhaps they will consider, as part of this, the possibility that more reliance could be placed on distance education or even, doing as the accountancy profession has done for years, consider the model where students join a law firm and take their examinations as they proceed through their training contract.

I accept that this model may be difficult to implement in the case of the Bar. Much of the substantive content of both the LPC and BVC could be done by distance learning, reducing the time (and cost) spent attending law schools and freeing the student to get paid work while studying to pay for their legal education.

And finally… the issue of plagiarism and cheat websites
Plagiarism is a serious matter in legal education and, for the most part, is addressed well by departments checking coursework against databases of known publications. One of the problems, however, is what happens when a student buys an essay or answer to a problem question from one of the essay-writing websites that guarantee their work is ‘plagiarism-free’.

I will not provide the oxygen of publicity to these organisations by providing weblinks, but a common theme seems to be that these organizations exempt themselves from responsibility by stating in solemn terms that work provided by them may not be submitted by the student to the university or law school as their own work.

In May 2007, the BBC reported that Google was going to ban essay-writing sites because of plagiarism problem in universities. It is, however, still possible to contact these organizations by using search engines. One essay-writing site I was able to find stated: “Buy Essay here – ‘X’ remains committed to delivering exactly what you want, when you want it.”

On another page, in the same website, I was able to read: “Taking the grind out of graduation: by outsourcing your writing and editing projects to us, you have more time on your hands to oversee the finer points of your project with the assurance that there are no errors to speak of.”

I have no difficulty with texts giving advice and guidance to students, nor the many published Q&A books by leading publishers (including my own organisation) because these give examples and guidance and are not ‘custom essays’. They are also in the public domain. I do object to students handing in a ‘custom essay’ as their own work and I am not that keen on the providers of these services exempting themselves from responsibility by asserting that their answers may not be presented to a university or institution as the student’s own work. The price of custom essays is very high. Are we really to accept that a student paying a substantial sum (from £60 to £100-plus) is buying that custom essay for ‘guidance’?

My online magazine Consilio is doing research into legal education and my colleague Norman Baird has already produced an interesting report on university progression rate from year one to year two. Charon has done a fair number of podcasts with legal educators, with more to come.