From students’ first week on campus through the bar exam, the Office of Academic Success at the USC Rice School of Law programs are building future lawyers’ skills.
All first-year law students are invited to attend Kick-Start, a one-week program prior to the start of law school. There, they learn essential skills like critical reading, briefing, legal analysis, outlining, and exam preparation. This past summer, Academic Success’ Kick-Start program had 10 virtual sections, each limited to 16 students for personalized attention.
All 1Ls take a course entitled Introduction to the Legal Profession. It includes the Academic Skills Lab (ASL) which is taught by second- and third-year law students following a pre-set curriculum. The ASL consists of six lunch sessions each semester focusing on practical skills that complement classroom instruction.
“We stress in all of our programming that you cannot learn to be a lawyer exclusively by reading. Just like an athlete, you have to practice,” says Brett Stevens, instructor and co-director of Academic Success.
In addition to group sessions, ASL tutors offer 15-minute individual appointments. These sessions allow students to work through practice problems, address skill-based questions, and explore available resources.
Academic Success collaborates with students individually to identify areas of improvement and develop strategies to help them succeed. They also encourage students to connect with their professors during office hours to get feedback on their reasoning and work and ask substantive questions about their readings.
While these programs are designed to help students be successful in law school, they’re also about keeping the bar in mind.
“Bar prep is a different set of skills from law school,” Stevens says. “The new focus of our program is to start early... It's really about putting the bar on the map for students so they're not waiting until 10 weeks before the bar exams.”
Academic Success programming shifts to bar preparation during students’ 3L year. Students can take the Legal Analysis Workshop, which covers the Multistate Essay Exam and Multistate Bar Exam, and a course on Preparing for the Multistate Performance Test.
A kick-off event helps students review highly tested bar topics and develop strategies to answer multiple-choice questions. The sample mini bar exam has 100 questions that gives students an idea of how they are performing on that portion of the exam.
As recent graduates prepare for the bar exam post-graduation, they are encouraged to take the Master the Bar Exam course, which complements commercial bar review courses. The course allows Academic Success to monitor student progress, provide feedback on assessments, and promote accountability.
“We did an earlier iteration of the summer course targeting struggling students. Of those that agreed to take it, more than 80 percent passed the bar,” says Alex Ruskell, who also co-directs Academic Success. “That gave us the confidence to further develop the program and offer it to all students the summer after graduation.”
To support the increase in program offerings throughout all three years of law school, Academic Success welcomed new instructor Taylor Callahan (‘16) this summer.
“When I was in law school, tutoring was it,” Callahan says. “The number and variety of programs Academic Success offers is overwhelming.”
With the introduction of the NextGen Bar Exam after 2028, this year’s 1Ls will likely be the first class to face a different bar exam from previous classes. Although the Supreme Court of South Carolina has not yet determined what the exam will look like, Academic Success is developing new courses and resources in anticipation, ensuring graduates are prepared for the future of legal licensing.
Whatever happens, Academic Success is confident Rice School of Law students will thrive.