21 students submitted evaluations for this course.
95% of the students enrolled in this course submitted evaluations.
| Zero | One | Two | Four | Four + | |
| 1. Approximately how many times were you absent from this class since the beginning of the quarter? | 17 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| I wasn't absent | Time Conflict | Illness | Did not deem class attendance worthwhile | Other | |
| 2. What was the usual reason for your absence? | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Never | Rarely | Usually | Always | Other | |
| 3. Indicate how often, on the average, you read the assigned materials prior to classes. | 0 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 0 |
| Strongly Agree | Agree | Neutral | Disagree | Strongly Disagree | |
| 4. This professor stimulated my interest in the subject matter of this course. | 5 | 11 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 5. The assigned readings were valuable to my understanding of this course. | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 0 |
| 6. The professor covered the course material in depth. | 8 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| 7. I found this course to be well organized. | 14 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 8. The professor held my attention in class. | 9 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| 9. This professor is always prepared prior to class. | 20 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 10. This professor was willing to assist me outside of class. | 17 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 11. This professor was responsive to my questions. | 12 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 12. This professor makes good use of class time. | 9 | 7 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| 13. This professor taught the class at a level that challenged me. | 9 | 9 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| 14. This professor effectively communicated the content of the course to me. | 8 | 9 | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| 15. I would recommend to others that they take this course. | 10 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 16. This professor motivated me to do my best work. | 9 | 9 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 17. I was able to keep up with the work load for this course. | 6 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18. I would enjoy taking another course from this professor. | 9 | 7 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| Positive and Negative comments about the professor: | Positive and negative comments about the course materials: |
| Very innovative teaching. Amazing amount of information for not so much class time. | Love the notebook he created! |
| Professor Thomson's strength is how much he cares about students, and matches the energy level that individual students put into their coursework. | |
| I think that this would be the hardest class to teach because the skills are ones that you have to learn yourself. But that said, overall I think that Professor Thompson has helped to effectively facilitate this learning process. Thomson cares a lot about his students and it shows. He is very organized. The assignments make sense, build on each other, and help to teach memo writing, case synthesis, library research, etc. Overall, I feel like I've got a good start on legal writing. Still, there are a few things that could be improved. I think that LP could have served me more in helping me understand how to write about the relationships between controlling/persuasive authority. In my last memo I felt like I didn't have the necessary vocabulary to discuss the relationships between authorities. How do past common law decisions affect a newly passed statute and how do you describe that relationship? I think it would have been helpful to have seen a memo dealing with this kind of situation... | The binder was great; it helped organize all the materials. I thought the on-line citation exercises were extremely helpful, but I wish that we had been assigned those earlier on and could work on them at our convenience instead of during the last part of the semester when it is extremely busy. I liked Just Writing and think the Calleros book is strong. I wish that there had been even more class exercises. My biggest complaint is that too many of the assignments were collaborative. Out of four memos, I think that two should be collaborative and two should be on your own. I just think it's important to get feedback on how you're doing by yourself before you have to write a memo by yourself. |
| I feel like there should have been more communication between Professor Thomson and the TA, and the writing clinic because I got completely different feedback from all three on certain topics. Further, I feel like the feedback of our papers could have been more detailed. And instead of spending class time reading us quotes about why we should be in law school, Prof. Thomson could have provided more guidance on the "sound" of legal writing is. More indepth discussion on how to write, and less dependence on the book to teach us to write. | |
| Prof. Thomson was extremely helpful. He walked student through the whole class step by step. I found it extremely helpful. | |
| He's very good, though the class is sometimes boring or the readings sometimes a bit too overbroad or dense. Nonetheless, I felt like I developed a pretty good handle on research and writing thanks to the assignments and out of class conferences with Professor Thomson, and he took a genuine interest in everyone's success. | I'm not a huge fan of the Calleros book, but the binder is great. Some of the in-class exercises could've been better, but overall he did a good job of giving us some idea of the main ideas of legal writing, and forcing us to learn it ourselves as well. |
| You can tell that Professor Thomson enjoys his job and geniunely likes teaching L.P. I would have prefered more individual assessment b/c when you get to the last memo, you don't know where your skills stand. I would also appreaciate direct answers to direct questions. | I din't care for the textbook; I found Just Writing a little more helpful. |
| Professor Thomason truly cares about his students. He does like leaving components of the class ambigious. I think that is his plan. Regardless, Thomson was always willing to meet with students outside of class, and he was very accessible outside of class. | The Just Writing book really detailed the stylist aspects of legal writing. I would prefer a book that better outlined the difference between an overview and thesis paragraph/statement. I would also have liked to see more stylistic exercises in class. |
| very well organized and enthusiastic about teaching. keep up the good work! | it seemed like the course materials faded into the background and werent really used after the first half of the class. But, I dont feel like I lost anything because of that. |
| When asked directed questions about the memos he never seemed to answer directly. The answers were always incripted and ultimatly not very helpful. It is nice that he is passionate about the course. More individual assesment of writing would have been helpful. While group work may result in better papers I do not believe it resulted in better learning. It was nerve racking to have no feed back on personal writing before having to write a paper alone that my whole grade ridded on. Group writing for the first memo and a half or so may be useful but after that writing individually is more helpful in feed back. Please change the group work set up to allow for more individual work so there is more individual assesment. | I didnt find any of the reading that I did to be helpful. For me it works better to apply things than to just read about them. |
| Professor Thomson is as enouraging, helpful, and insightful as I could imagine from a professor. He discusses important real-world issues outside of law studies, reminding students that law school is merely the beginning of the practice. I would highly recommend taking his course, and at the very least, popping into his office to introduce yourself to him. He has great interest and advice regarding 1st year students' development through the law school experience. | |
| I think Professor Thomson had very interesting neck ties. He usually wore a tie for the theme of the class. Besides having a stunning collection of neckties, I really enjoyed Professor Thomson's class. At a time when time and organization are very important, Professor Thomson's class always provided a "breathe of fresh air" for me because I always knew that we would be on track and focused on our goals for the day. When you come from a full day of classes that you may be six or seven cases behind and the prof. catches the class up all in one day, it get's a little pressing. I felt very comfortable in his class. Professor Thomson also made his office comfortable. He was always reassuring when reassurance was needed most. The 1st year of law school is a difficult time and having Professor Thomson as an instructor took away some of the burden. THANKS PROFESSOR THOMSON! | The course is great. I love to write. This is the only class that you get constant feedback. I really enjoy LP. |
| Professor Thomson clearly cares about the progress and understanding of his students. He wanted us to succeed, and really tried to give us the skills needed to do that. I think that he was a good teacher, but sometimes needed a little more clear of an answer. However, being forced to figure it out on my own probably taught me more (teach the man to fish instead of giving him a fish). The only thing I would have really appreciated are more comments on the content and analysis on the memos once completed. | Sometimes the class felt like our kindergarten intro to law school. It watered things down for me and helped give me a better understanding of how to handle my course work in other classes. I think the class is incredibly useful because of the writing skills it taught, and I really feel like I learned a lot between the first and fourth memos. I liked the grammar lessons, and the tests. I feel like it effectively taught the Bluebook. Kendra was great. Sometimes I felt like the class time was too long for what we went over. I think that most of my learning went on outside of class. I think that the collaborative work was very difficuly, especially trying to compromise in scheduling and writing style issues. However, it taught me a lot. I think I would have benefitted from peer review on the fourth memo, or perhaps on one of the earlier memos. Also, the readings were mostly helpful, especially Just Writing, but especially at the beginning of the course, I felt like I was reading the manual to a product that I didn't even own yet. I don't know how the order of the readings and learning could have been better, but I do think it could improve. I also found the senior partner meetings useful. |
| Overall, I have found the LP class to be frustrating because of lack of instruction and lack of timely feedback. In general, the focus seems to be on the students learning the process on their own with a generous dose of not clearly directing them in advance, but certainly docking them for not learning it correctly on their own. Questions are routinely answered with "What do you think?" I think the readings are generally irrelevant. If this is a writing class, then let's write and learn how to write better. In my experience, doing it with concrete instructions and constructive timely feedback have been much better teachers than reading about it. | |
| Positive: Prof. Thomson really cares about his students and that they do well and that they are as happy as they can be going through the law school experience; he's a very organized and well-prepared professor and he's always willing to help you outside of class. Negative: I think there are times that Prof. Thomson doesn't get to the point and makes things too flowery, and that looses some students and then those students get frustrated with his class. | Positive: The course was good in that Prof. Thomson had us do group work, which we need to learn to do well. Negative: The course, I think, was designed very deficiently. How Thomson did it was that we had group memo projects the first three times, and then the fourth and final memo was solo. That was really hard on a lot of students for various reasons. One reason that I felt was that a lot of times, my partners were control freaks that wanted to write the paper and be in charge of the citations on all of the group memos; the problem with that is that on the last memo it was really hard to gauge the time and effort it would take me personally to do the entire memo since I had not done one previously on my own. And then there were people who felt that they did all of the work while their partners sat back and did nothing, and that happened for a full three memos; this made the fourth memo very difficult for a lot of people. I would recommend changing the structure so that people are gradually forced to not only work with other people, but they must be forced to also learn to work on legal writing on their own--- before the end of the semester comes, and I think that would help people learn the bluebook and legal writing sooner and better. |