Over at the [non]Billable Hour, they have this thing called Five-by-Five, where five bloggers are invited to share five ideas each on things. Recently, the topic was "Five things you'd change about law school." I thought I'd add my two cents, though I'll just focus on the things the other people didn't mention. I really liked, for example, Jeremy's comments about the recruiting process, I think I support the idea of reducing law school to two years, and I definitely agree with the comments about making law school more practical toward the practice of law. Here's what else I have to say:

1. Revamp Financial Aid
I'm sure every school's Financial Aid program is different, but here at Harvard, they calculate your "need" based on how much you, the student, can contribute and how much your parents can contribute to your education. The student by definition can contribute essentially his entire net worth. His parents are assumed to contribute a sizable portion of their entire net worth as well. But these are faulty assumptions. I'll let the personal contribution one go, but nobody's parents are paying for their law school education (unless their parents are soooo rich they're paying for the entire thing and the student doesn't need financial aid at all, I suppose). Quite pretending like they are. I'm going to have to come up with money myself to cover what my parents are "supposed" to cover, so why can't we include that when assessing how much of my aid should be loan and how much should be grant?

Harvard's Low Income Protection Plan is pretty good--graduates who take a low-paying legal job can have their debt forgiven bit by bit, so they aren't destroyed by debt. But they should lift the requirement that your low-paying job has to be legal in nature. What if I graduate from law school disillusioned with the law and decide to be a high school civics teacher? What if a friend of mine has a really great entrepreneurial idea that I want to get in on, but it's not going to pay off for a few years? What if (and this is the most important to me, but the least likely change to happen) I decide to drop out of the workforce altogether and stay at home raising my kids? I think it's fairly telling that of the 40 or so LDS students here at HLS, only three are women. We Mormons place great emphasis on mothers being able to spend time with their children, and I think most LDS women who would enjoy and benefit from law school look at the potential debt burden and decide it won't be worth it financially. Financial considerations should not be (very) determinative of whether or not to achieve a certain level of education. We should provide a way for people who want to use their law degree in non-legal ways to be able to afford it.

Oh, and while I'm talking about financial aid, law school should be cheaper in general.

2. Grading
Everyone knows grading in law school is too random to be indicative of anything. Our curve is centered around a B+ and the As and the Cs are few and far between. So I would want to come up with some way to accurately represent in a grade what the student has learned in a class. I think the classes where I have written papers instead of taken a test reflect better what I learned in the class (perhaps because I generally have gotten better grades from papers than from tests). But tests aren't going anywhere, so they should be changed to reflect what we have learned, not how well we can read the mind of the teacher. I respect the fact that the traditional issue-spotter test question is more similar to situations a practicing lawyer will face, but the way we are taught and the way we learn does not prepare us for such situations. Either change the pedagogy or change the examination format, but don't leave them pointing in opposite directions like they are.

We also need to eliminate this process whereby 100% of the final grade is based on the final exam. I would much rather have small, graded assignments throughout the semester rather than one big horrendous Judgment Day at the end. My legal education has been woefully lacking in feedback. Sure, I suppose I could truck up to the professors' offices every week to make sure I'm understanding the material, but I just don't have time to do both that and the reading I'm assigned. I think regular assignments would facilitate class discussion, make the Socratic method less intimidating (it's easy to discuss something you've already given an answer to), and would make the final grade more representative of what you've learned.

Because when law firms and judges look at pools of nearly identical candidates and make selections based on grades, we should feel confident that they're using a valid criterion for their decisions, right?