Introduction

Entering law school with these goals, I was both surprised at my success and dismayed at the general incompetency of the legal education system. Law school became a source of inspiration and frustration. I was inspired because my prior years of experience and skill building helped to make me successful. I was frustrated because of the confusing, humiliating, and demoralizing effect that traditional legal pedagogy had on students.⁽²⁾ 

Although I enjoyed my success, I was disheartened by the implied notion embodied in traditional legal pedagogy. Namely, that only those individuals who have an extremely high level of the requisite skills upon entering law school can succeed in law school and will become "good lawyers." Legal education's failure to teach skills to varying levels of entering abilities displayed this attitude. Traditional legal pedagogy fails to clearly identify for students what a student needs to know and be able to do to succeed in law school. Moreover, traditional legal pedagogy fails to teach clearly and precisely the thinking skills embodied in the phrase "thinking like a lawyer." Traditional legal pedagogy fails to provide adequate opportunities for students to learn or improve their skills through practice and critique.⁽³⁾ 

Thus, success in law school is dependent not only upon the quality of the educational system and the efforts of the students, but also upon students entering with sufficiently high levels of the requisite skills so that the legal educational system's failures minimally affect their success.⁽⁴⁾ Many students who fail in law school do so because legal education, through its failure, does not attempt to educate as much as it attempts to weed out students and to rank the students who remain. Thus, the problem of an educationally unsound legal pedagogy leads many students to failure (or poor performance) where failure (or poor performance) may have been avoidable. 

Intuitively, if not consciously, recognition of this dilemma causes many first year law students to become overwhelmed by a fear of failure.⁽⁵⁾ 

The initial fear intensifies as the semester progresses until some students become paralyzed by "failure anxiety." Failure anxiety is the condition represented by the following statement: "I am so concerned about failing my examination that I am unable to study."⁽⁶⁾ The causes of failure anxiety can be traced to four factors: (1) high expectations, (2) the method of law school instruction, (3) the subject matter and method of study, and (4) the importance of first semester grades.⁽⁷⁾ 

First, many students who enter law schools have done well academically in the past and have high expectations of how they will do in law school. When such students perceive themselves as being in the middle of the class, because they received only Cs, they consider themselves failures.⁽⁸⁾ 

Second, the student must adjust to a method of instruction that provides very little feedback or opportunity to practice developing skills.⁽⁹⁾ The so- called Socratic method results in many law professors making few evaluative comments about a student's classroom performance. Thus, typical first year classes provide little, if any, opportunity for feedback of written analytical skills such as issue-spotting, analysis, and writing. As a result, many law students enter their exams not having had any feedback on the skills needed to do well. In fact, most students will go through the entire semester not knowing how effective their method of study was and having even less information on how to improve their method of study.⁽¹⁰⁾ 

Third, most first-year law students do not know how to study successfully. In part, this is due to the significant change in teaching methods and expectations between college and law school -- a change that is more significant than the one between high school and college.⁽¹¹⁾ 

The first semester in law school is like the first semester in college. You don't know what the hell you are doing, with the exception that you don't have any interim exams [in law school] to help you out. I suppose I betray something when I say I don't know how much I should study. I don't know how much we have to know, in what depth we have to go, what analysis we'll have to do, and how much of an acquaintance we have to have with certain points. ⁽¹²⁾ 

Finally, while one bad semester does not drastically influence an undergraduate's entire educational career, it can in law school. For instance, students who get poor first semester grades may not be able to recover sufficiently to be chosen for law review, moot court, judicial clerkships or prestigious summer job interviews.⁽¹³⁾ Given the lack of evaluative feedback, a student's generally poor study habits, and grading curves, it is a rare student who can offset a poor first semester. 

Nevertheless, student anxiety can be lessened with improved legal instruction⁽¹⁴⁾ and with a legal pedagogy that is consistent with the principles of learning. Such a pedagogy includes understanding how students learn and helping students to develop strategies for learning that are consistent with their learning styles.⁽¹⁵⁾ 

egal education prides itself in being an educational system that demands that its students be self-motivated learners. The student with poor study skills will not perform well. The student who has a poor understanding of how to achieve academic success will not do well. Yet, law schools do very little to assure that their students understand what it means to be a self- motivated learner or to possess the necessary study skills. I am convinced that this failure is because legal education actually knows very little about self- motivated learning or learning styles. There have been only a few articles written in the last ten years on how law students learn or learning style theory in legal education.⁽¹⁶⁾ The only study published on law students' learning styles utilizing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is almost thirty years old.⁽¹⁷⁾ As far as I can determine, no legal article has discussed improving students' performance by incorporating an understanding of the different learning styles of students into the development of teaching methods.⁽¹⁸⁾ Furthermore, despite changing demographics that have resulted in a more diverse student population,⁽¹⁹⁾ only one article addresses differences in learning styles of law students in the context of the issue of diversity. ⁽²⁰⁾Because performance in law school is so important, this lack of self-study is a major deficiency .

This study was done to explore the relationship between learning style and performance. In particular, its purpose was to discern the MBTI for first year law students and to describe the relationship between the MBTI and performance.⁽²¹⁾ 

*** Copyright (c) 1993 Vernellia R. Randall.  All Rights Reserved. Associate Professor of Law, The University of Dayton School of Law. J.D., Northwestern School of Law, Lewis and Clark College, 1987; M.S.N., University of Washington, 1978; B.S.N., University of Texas, 1972. 

 I would like to thank the Institute for Law School Teaching for the grant under which this document was developed. Points of view expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the Institute for Law School Teaching. I would also like to thank my colleagues: Professors Kimberly O'Leary, Susan Brenner and Marla Mitchell for their critical and helpful comments. Finally, I am grateful for the prompt and untiring research assistance of Lisa Feeling, Tshaka Randall and Scott Hauert. I cannot, of course, forget the continuing good humor and support of my sons -- Tshaka and Issa. 

1. FN1. So, even before entering law school, I undertook a goal of figuring out what the legal education system wanted. I bought several books on how to study for law school and, unlike many students, I did not enter law school thinking that I would become some great legal scholar, jurist, rainmaker, or even a law professor. I entered focused on 

 conquering the environment. 

2. FN2. When you enter law school, you are told that you will be taught to "think like a lawyer." The general unspoken implication is that "thinking like a lawyer" is uniquely different from thinking like a nurse, a physician, or any other profession. Yet, it is my observation that the skills required to think like a lawyer are exactly the skills required to think like a nurse. To think like a nurse you must be able take a set of facts provided by a patient, define the nursing problem, select which of the facts provided by the patient are pertinent to the problem, determine what nursing rules apply to the situation, formulate and select alternative nursing diagnoses, and draw valid conclusions from the facts, nursing knowledge, and inferences. How this process differs from "thinking like a lawyer" remains a mystery to me. 

3. FN3. Exams once a semester are not a sufficient opportunity for law students to learn from his or her mistakes. Such a practice gives a significant advantage to some based upon behavioral characteristics that were brought into the law school environment. Imagine, if you will, taking a class in piano playing. Assume the teacher focuses all of her effort on analyzing sheet music of great musicians. At each class, students are called  on to dissect, digest, analyze and compare various works. Occasionally, they are asked to play very short snippets, but most of the time they read and discuss. At the end of the course when the students have learned everything there is to know about the treble and base clefs, timing, notes, beats and rhythms, the student is asked to take a final exam, which consists of playing a piano piece that they have never seen before. They are given no time to practice the piece. The piano is wheeled in and the students proceed. 

Assume the professor discloses to the students this testing practice, but adamantly assures the students that if they prepare for class diligently they will be prepared for the exam. Who will do well on the exam? Will it be the person who never sat down to a piano before this class? Will it be the student who ignores the professor's assurances and takes piano lessons independently? Will it be the person who has taken piano as a child or during college 

4. FN4. Some will argue this is the role of the law school -- to teach to the highest level of skill. It might have been justifiable to take that stance when all the entering students had essentially the same background -- white, upper- middle class, male -- and when the legal system was tailored for the practice of persons from that background. Such a stance  today is unconscionable. The American society is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. The legal system, and those representing the system, must come from diverse cultural, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. Law schools must develop a pedagogy that allows those who are not white, upper-middle class males to succeed with the same frequency as those who are. Many students, while having the intelligence and abilities necessary to make a good lawyer, lack the requisite skill level to succeed the way legal education is currently approached . This is evidenced by the extremely high (up to 50%) attrition rate among students of color. 

5. FN5. Lawrence Silver, Comment, Anxiety and the First Semester of Law School, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 1201-18 (1968); See generally G. Andrew H. Benjamin, et al., The Role of Legal Education in Producing Psychological Distress Among Law Students and Lawyers, 1986 Am. B. Found. Res. J. 225, 246 (reporting results of statistical study which shows that law school produces a wide variety of psychological symptoms including obsessive-compulsive behavior, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation and psychoticism (social alienation and isolation)); Robert Stevens, Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Va. L. Rev. 551, 639-40 (1973) (reporting results of study of a small number of students at Yale Law School); James Archer, Jr. & Martha M. Peters, Law Student Stress, 23 

NASPA J. 48, 51 (1986) (reporting that more than half of the 367 students in the study emphasized that lack of feedback regarding grades during the semester produced the most stress); Steven B. Shanfield & G. Andrew H. Benjamin, Psychiatric Distress in Law Students, 35 J. Legal Educ. 65, 69 (1985) (reporting study that suggests law students have a higher rate of psychiatric distress than medical students). But see M.J. Hamilton et al., Thirty-five Law Student Suicides, 11 J. Psychiatry & L. 335, 342 (1983) (suggesting that the suicide rate for law students is lower than the general population for the same age group). 

6. FN6. Silver, supra note 5, at 1202. See generally Alan A. Stone, Legal Education on the Couch, 85 Harv. L. Rev. 392 (1971) (analyzing the psychological pressures to which law students are subject). 

7. FN7. Silver, supra note 5, at 1202-10. Additional causes of anxiety have been identified as "insensitive classroom teaching methods," unsympathetic families and friends, absence of periodic meaningful feedback, a narrow focus of traditional legal analysis, unapproachability of professors, confusion in the classroom, uncertainty over what one should be learning, "a realization that the study of law is open-ended, the recognition that one's friends are also one's competitors; and, most significantly, disappointment over grades." Michael I. Swygert, Putting Law School Grades in Perspective, 12 Stetson L. Rev. 701, 702 (1983). 

8. FN8. Silver, supra note 5, at 1202. 

9. FN9. See generally Banks McDowell, The Dilemma of a (Law) Teacher, 52 B.U.L. Rev. 247 (1972); Suzanne Dallimore, The Socratic Method -- More Harm Than Good, 3 J. Contemp. L. 177 (1977). 

10. FN10. Silver, supra note 5, at 1205. 

11. FN11. Id. 

12. FN12. Id. at 1209 (alteration in original). 

13. FN13. See Swygert, supra note 7, at 704 (noting that "to be asked to join law review, and to maximize job opportunities all require certain levels of grades"); Emily Campbell & Alan J. Tomkins, Gender, Race, Grades, and Law Review Membership as Factors in Law Firm Hiring Decisions: An Empirical Study, 18 J. Contemp. L. 211, 232-33 (1992) (reporting that the most important variable in applicant evaluation was grades because law firms consistently favor students in the upper 10% of the class as compared to the upper 30% of the class; although the study also suggests that blacks are not always treated the same as whites and women are not always treated the same as men); Thomas Doniger, Grades: Review of Academic Evaluations in Law Schools, 11 Pac. L.J. 743, 743-46 (1980) (noting that not only do grades affect ability to secure law-related employment but they also affect a student's eligibility for financial assistance). 

14. FN14. See generally Charles D. Kelso, Science and our Teaching Methods: Harmony or Discord?, 13 J. Legal Educ. 183 (1960). 

15. FN15. Fifty years ago law students may have been a homogenous lot: recent college graduates, upper middle-class white males in the top 15% of their undergraduate class with a pre-law, political science, or liberal arts major. Today, the entering law school student is as likely to be female or a person of color as a white male. Many of the students have been out of college for three to five years. Furthermore, there is significant diversity in their college majors: education, fine arts, engineering, nursing, medicine, as well as political science and liberal arts. Thus, we can no longer afford to assume that all students will learn through one strategy. It has become increasingly more important that legal education adapt its curriculum and instruction to learners' aptitudes. 

16. FN16. See generally Raymond B. Marcin, Psychological Type Theory in the Legal Profession, 24 U. Tol. L. Rev. 103 (1992) (discussing the role of psychological type theory in the context of law study or entry into the legal profession); David W. Champagne, Improving Your Teaching: How Do Students Learn?, 83 Law Libr. J. 85 (1991) (presenting several learning styles and providing a broad overview of the application of learning styles to teaching in general); Eileen B. Cohen, Teaching Legal Research to a Diverse Student Body, 85 Law Libr. J. 583 (1993) (asserting that student learning of legal research can be improved by expanding teaching methods to incorporate the variety of learning styles that characterize a diverse law student population); Don J. DeBenedictis, Learning by Doing: The Clinical Skills Movement Comes of Age, 76 A.B.A. J. 54 (Sept. 1990) (mentioning the use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in a clinical setting to suggest negotiating methods and to explore students' learning styles or to line them up with compatible externship supervisors); Cynthia A. Kelly, Education for Lawyer Competency: A Proposal for Curricular Reform, 18 New Eng. L. Rev. 607 (1983) (discussing learning styles and the application of learning theory to legal education); Robert Bookman, Helping Associates Succeed, 12 ALA News 6 (June/July 1993) (suggesting that helping associates succeed requires good teachers who adapt their teaching style to the associate's learning style); Julie Macfarlane & Pat Boyle, Instructional Design and Student Learning in Professional Legal Education, 4 Legal Educ. Rev. 63 (1993); Nicolette Rogers, Improving the Quality of Learning in Law Schools by Improving Student Assessment, 4 Legal Educ. Rev. 113 (1993); Paul T. Wangerin, Learning Strategies for Law Students, 52 Alb. L. Rev. 471-528 (1988); Paul T. Wangerin, Teaching and Learning in Law School: An "Alternative" Bookshelf for Law School Teachers, 29 Gonz. L. Rev. 49 (1994); Paul T. Wangerin, Law School Academic Support Programs, 40 Hastings L.J. 771 (1989) (suggesting that several techniques of law school classroom teaching can be used to help high risk and probationary students learn both substantive material and independent learning skills). 

17. FN17. See Paul V. Miller, The Contribution of Non-Cognitive Variables to the Prediction of Student Performance in Law School, Dissertation Abstracts 27, 1679A (Univ. Microfilms No. 66-4630) (1966); Paul V. Miller, Personality Differences and Student Survival in Law School, 19 J. Legal Educ. 460 (1967); cf. Raymond B. Marcin, Psychological Type Theory in the Legal Profession, 24 U. Tol. L. Rev. 103 (1992) (indicating that pre-law advisors have taken to using psychological typing indicators as aids in career counseling, family law practitioners use psychological typing indicators as conciliation tools, and law firms use them in personnel development programs). 

18. FN18. But cf., Lisa I. Leiden et al., Assessing Learning-Style Inventories and How Well They Predict Academic Performance, 65(6) Acad. Med. 395-401 (1990). 

19. FN19. Between 1963 and 1992, female law students increased from 4 percent to 43 percent. Between 1977 and 1992, law students of color increased from 8 percent to 17 percent. A Review of Legal Education in the United States: Fall 1992, A.B.A. Sec. Legal Educ. & Admis. Bar, at 67-70 (1993). Furthermore, in 1988, twenty-seven percent of students graduating from law school were over 29 years old. Lisa Green Markoff, Bias Against Older Students, Gays Has an Effect on Two Campuses, Nat'l L.J., Oct. 30, 1989, at 4. 

20. FN20. See Cohen, supra note 16; cf. Norma J. Ewing & Fung Lan Yong, Learning Style Preferences of Gifted Minority Students, 9 Gifted Educ. Int'l 40-44 (1993) (comparing learning style preferences among gifted African-American, Mexican-American, and American-born Chinese middle grade students. Significant ethnic, gender, and grade differences were found.); Charles S. Claxton, Learning Styles, Minority Students, and Effective Education, 14 J. Dev. Educ., Fall 1990, at 6-8, 35 (arguing that minority students do not have learning styles different from students of the dominant culture; stressing that an understanding of cultural and gender factors will help developmental instructors become more effective teachers); Rita Dunn & Shirley A. Griggs, Research on the Learning Style Characteristics of Selected Racial and Ethnic Groups, 6 J. Reading, Writing, & Learning Disabilities Int'l, July-Sept. 1990, at 261-80 (concluding that individual rather than group characteristics must be addressed when providing instruction -- regardless of cultural or racial background); Asa G. Hilliard, III, Teachers and Cultural Styles in a Pluralistic Society, 7(6) NEA Today, Jan. 1989, at 65-69 (suggesting that teachers be sensitive to and respectful of their students' cultural learning styles without stereotyping; arguing that a student's learning style is neither an excuse for poor teaching nor an index of low capacity). 

21. FN21. This study was made on the following assumptions. First, law schools admit students with differing learning styles, study habits, and study attitudes and will continue to do so. Second, law schools have grading practices that result in dismissal at the end of the first semester or first year. Finally, law students attending the University of Dayton School of Law are representative of students attending other law schools. 

The study did not consider learning styles not measured by the MBTI. The study did not consider the impact of cultural or educational differences on study habits, learning attitudes or performance. 

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