22 students submitted evaluations for this course.
100% 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? | 13 | 6 | 3 | 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 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 2 |
| Never | Rarely | Usually | Always | Other | |
| 3. Indicate how often, on the average, you read the assigned materials prior to classes. | 0 | 2 | 14 | 6 | 0 |
| Strongly Agree | Agree | Neutral | Disagree | Strongly Disagree | |
| 4. This professor stimulated my interest in the subject matter of this course. | 12 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 5. The assigned readings were valuable to my understanding of this course. | 10 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| 6. The professor covered the course material in depth. | 12 | 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 7. I found this course to be well organized. | 15 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 8. The professor held my attention in class. | 12 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 9. This professor is always prepared prior to class. | 19 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 10. This professor was willing to assist me outside of class. | 18 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 11. This professor was responsive to my questions. | 16 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 12. This professor makes good use of class time. | 13 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 13. This professor taught the class at a level that challenged me. | 13 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 14. This professor effectively communicated the content of the course to me. | 16 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 15. I would recommend to others that they take this course. | 17 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 16. This professor motivated me to do my best work. | 16 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 17. I was able to keep up with the work load for this course. | 9 | 11 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 18. I would enjoy taking another course from this professor. | 17 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Positive and Negative comments about the professor: | Positive and negative comments about the course materials: |
| He is a thoroughly engaged professor who genuinly cares about the needs, ideas, and lives of his students. | |
| Wonderful professor! Professor Thomson genuinely cares about his students and is willing to give extra help outside of class on a moment's notice. While he certainly challenged us, we are definitely better off for it. | The course text were helpful, especially b/c they provided several examples. This is key for someone who has never laid eyes on legal writing. |
| Professor Thomson is a prof who genuinely cares about his students' performance in the course. The memo is quite a challenging body of work...the numerous revisions were worthwhile in understanding the basic parts of the memo and how they are incorporated into a final memo. Thanks so much for a great semester! I have no negative comments whatsoever. Looking forward to next semester! | Great books. |
| You are lucky if you have him as your LP professor! He's a great teacher and really care about his students. Very enthusiastic and cares about your future. | Adequate |
| One of the best Professors I've ever had! | The asignment sheets could be a little more detailed and fully explain the requirements of the assignment and exactly how it should be turned in. |
| Professor Thomson is a fabulous professor. You can tell he cares about the success of each and everyone of his students, in and out of law school. This is a rarity among law school professors. He's very comfortable to be around and ask questions of, and he treats you with respect, regardless of how ridiculous your question may be. He knows each student individually and remembers things about you and genuinely makes you feel that he is there to help and assist. | It would have been more helpful to have more "doing" activities, rather than power points. The power points were more helpful out of class than in class. Exercises like the punctuation exercise were helpful, and although I hate admitting it, reading quizzes are helpful to test our knowledge of the subject matter. Overall, it's a good class and I feel the books we use are very helpful. |
| Prof. Thomson very clearly has a passion for teaching and the material. I greatly appreciated his enthusiasm for the material and the class. When I needed help in class or outside of class, he was very cooperative and helpful. I would most definitely take another class from him. | Way too many extraneous handouts, but you can always recycle them. |
| Professor Thomson was very organized and competent in his treatment of the material. He majored on the majors and minored on the minors. He has a good demeanor with the first year students. His dedication and passion are to be commended, considering this was "just" an LP course. | Nada. |
| Professor Thomson is one of the greatest professors whom I have ever met. | This course is really helpful to build my practical skill. |
| A truly caring professor. I felt like he made efforts beyond what a normal proffesor does to communicate with us and let us know he truly cares. For instance, he constantly motivated us to stick through the tough times. He would read inspirational quotes to keep us on the right track. If i could have a professor that cared this much about students all the time law school would not be as stressful. | Great material. Seems to be very useful for our future. |
| professor thompson is one of my favorite profeesors at the school. He is one of the only teachers that i feel is genuinely interested and invested in how his students do. his door was always open, and he was concedrned with the whole picture of the students life outside of school work as well. | i did not think that all of the readings were paricularly useful, but the materials presented in class were very helpful. |
| Professor Thomson was genuinely concerned about each one of us as students. He was very willing and available to meet with us to discuss the course material in person and at length. Also, in these last few days before our memo was due, he was very quick to respond to emails with great advice and help. I am glad to be a student in Professor Thomson's class. | The difficulty with the course was the variation in work load. At the beginning of the course, the work load was lighter and it progessively increased throughout the semester. This is not really a problem, particularly since we get better at handling the work load from our other classes throughout the semester. I really enjoyed the course because it was a great break from reading cases. It also seemed to be the most practical class. I can really see the value and purpose of this course. Additionally, I think my writing increased greatly in the course of the semester. |
| Professor Thomson, Thanks for a tough class. Your teaching methods was often frustrating, but effective. I understand that grading papers is not the highlight of a law professor's day, but I would discourage assigning writing to groups. I think reaserching in groups works, but writting does not. | I found the subject matter difficult. The process is not the most exciting. That being said, I feel I worked hard and learned a lot. One has to learn how to walk before one can run. |
| Professor Thomson was a great LP professor. He was always prepared and put a lot of effort into the class, was concerned about the students and enthusiastic about the material. One thing I wish he had done differently would be to use the class time to really work on legal writing. Lots of the handouts, activities and powerpoints were kind of vague, like, why are we becoming lawyers? what is the purpose of legal writing? etc. I would have liked it if he had done more of the directly related activities in class, like writing excercises. It would have been good to read some memos from real lawyers and then discuss them. One thing that was supposed to be pretty clear but ended up being totally confusing was the different procedures for handing in our assignments. Sometimes it was one copy, other times two, sometimes electronic submission, sometimes not. Sometimes one copy was in the portforlio and one went to Bree, other times both were in the portfolio, and on and on. Also it was kind of annoying to make copies of out returned assignments. It was much better when Professor Thomson started doing the electronic comments so he could just print two copies and give each partner. | The Welford text was very helpful as a reference guide, but it was kind of a wierd book to read nightly as homework. Same goes for the "Just Writing" book, it was a great reference but it seemed kind of pointless to sit down and just read a chapter of them. The powerpoints about grammar and writing were useful but they could be condensed a little. I like how almost everything is available on the TWEN site. It would be helpful if the assigment sheets were on the TWEN site since they are all very specific and we are constantly refering back to them. |
| I believe that Professor Thomson, along with the other professors for section 2B and 2D should attempt to better co-ordinate their assignments and exams. The multicase assignment in LP was due on the same day as a torts exam and the casemap research assignment was due on the same day as a civil procedure exam. Both a contracts and torts midterm were within a week and a half of the final office memo. I expect better teamwork from a law school faculty, particularly when they expect a great deal of group work from their students. Aside from this general gripe, I found Professor Thomson to be an excellent instructor. | I believe that the section about how to brief cases should be read in the first week. I also believe that the writing book was unnecessary because most of the material was emailed by the writing specialist or covered in the main text. |
| I think that Professor Thomson is a very good professor. He has a lot of enthusiasm for the course and he is committed to helping students grasp the material. At the same time, I think that the teaching and the course are structured to be more difficult than necessary. I think that rather than create little hurdles along the way, the materially could be taught with a better focus on substantive material. For example, if we were assigned more writing especially in class, and if we were given a better understanding of what our professor wanted, we could produce better writing with more confidence. Legal writing is all about writing for a particular audience in order to express a particular opinion. Time spent trying to figure out what our professor wants is not an effective use of our time and energy. I have been told by judges as well as senior partners that when they assign writing projects to clerks or associates there is no ambiguity in the assignment. time is a valuable comodity that is best spent actually producing results rather than merely attempting to produce something that could possibly be the right thing, or not. in support of that, i know that some professors teach lp by telling students exactly what should be on the paper, how to structure it and how to say it. | see above... |
| Professor Thomson is one of the best organized professors I have ever had. He is fun and memorable. He is also very accessable and fosters confidence in his students. | Great in-class material. The books and readings are what you want to take from them... |