When schools talk about student retention, conversations often center on admissions metrics, financial aid, and student life. But one of the most powerful drivers of retention sits quietly at the heart of the institution. Academic support professionals don’t just help students learn legal doctrine. They help students belong, persist, and believe they can succeed. When that work is integrated into a school’s broader retention strategy, the impact can be transformative.

Students rarely leave law school because of a single bad grade. More often, attrition starts quietly with confusion, isolation, or discouragement. Academic support educators are often among the first to see the signs. By tracking early indicators, like missed assignments, disengagement, and repeated skill gaps, academic support programs can serve as the early warning system of the institution. Proactive outreach, coupled with partnerships across the institution, can turn early struggles into early recoveries.

Retention also has more depth than just academic mastery. It is often about emotional endurance. Law school tests identity as must as intellect, and academic support offers a uniquely safe space to teach students how to recover from setbacks, manage self-doubt, and reframe failure as feedback. Workshops and coaching on self-regulation, metacognition, and exam reflection don’t just improve grades; they build the grit that keeps students enrolled and engaged.

Ultimately, retention strategies thrive when decisions are both data-informed and human-centered. Academic support can lead the way by collecting meaningful data and interpreting it through a student-focused lens. Some data might include attendance trends, self-assessment results, and reflections surveys. Instead of just asking “who’s struggling,” we can ask: what patterns in our programming predict continued engagement? Which interventions most effectively rebuild student confidents? How do different groups experience our curriculum and culture? This deeper analysis helps schools invest resources where they’ll make the most difference.

Too often, academic support is framed as a safety net rather than a partner in institutional success. Academic support often occupies the middle ground between faculty, student affairs, and administration, making ASP teams powerful connectors. When academic support professionals share data and insights, they can help the institution align academics, wellness, and financial support around a common goal: student persistence.

Retention isn’t just about keeping students enrolled. It is about helping them flourish. Academic support professionals do this every day through mentoring, coaching, and teaching. When institutions recognize academic support programs as a central pillar of retention, they stop viewing it as a back-end intervention and start leveraging it as a front-line strategy for equity, engagement, and student success.

(Dayna Smith)

Self-regulated learning[1] is a valuable tool that many law students should learn in their first year. While some may already have this skill upon entering law school, others will learn how to self-regulate their learning as part of a first-year skills course. On the other hand, other students may struggle with this. Some students who work with academic and bar support educators, whether voluntarily or as part of a mandated program, often need assistance in developing their ability to self-regulate their learning.

As academic and bar success educators, we can help law students build this skill more purposefully in our student meetings. In practice, it requires us to resist the urge to prescribe tasks a student should complete prior to a follow-up meeting. Instead, to allow a student more actively participate in their own learning, we should simply ask: “What would you like to prepare for me next week?”

By shifting the responsibility for evaluation and planning to the student, the student learner is able to more actively engage with self-regulated learning. Students who do this can also better implement this learning strategy outside of the guided academic meeting environment. It also helps them develop a growth mindset because once they (perhaps with your help) have identified a learning challenge, they establish the mindset that it can be remedied and create the plan to do so. Doing this allows the student to take one more step closer to being an expert learner, capable of law school and bar exam success—and future practice success.

Not only does this approach support law student learning, but it also reduces the mental load you, as an academic or bar success educator, manage. Rather than having to determine what a student can and cannot accomplish yet based on where they are in course work or hoping they will complete the task they may not want to, you shift the onus off of you and back onto them. (Afterall, you have completed law school and passed the bar exam—that’s now their task.)

Plus, when a student decides what they want to bring to the next meeting, I find they are also more likely to accomplish the task. They did not get told to do something; they came up with the task and know they can do it because they told you they could. And because you did not have to come up with the task, it also provides a great opening for your next meeting: “Remind me what you planned to accomplish today and let me know how that went.”

Our students are adults learning a profession. Even as educators, we cannot always give them the answers (nor should we); the ability to find the answer and execute the solution is something they are capable of doing. And by shifting your mindset in student meetings, you’re also helping them to realize the tools that will help make them expert life-long learners.

(Erica M. Lux)

[1] Self-regulated learning is a skill that requires the learner to assess and plan, implement the plan while monitoring progress towards a goal, and evaluate the success of the plan before starting the cycle over again.  See this great article by Michael Hunter Schwartz on Self-Regulated Learning: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=959467.

Job Description

The Associate Director participates in the development and implementation of a comprehensive program that partners with students and alumni from admission through bar passage. The Associate Director is primarily responsible for bar preparation counseling, planning, and presenting skills workshops, and coaching alumni who are studying for the bar exam in Uniform Bar Examination and NextGen Uniform Bar Exam jurisdictions.

Education and Experience

• JD degree from an ABA accredited law school, required.
• Member of bar in good standing in any U.S. jurisdiction, required within 6 months of hire.
• 3+ years’ experience in legal academic support and bar preparation, preferred.
• Teaching or experience with student advising as related to academic issues, preferred.
• High level of organization, flexibility, sound judgment, and interpersonal skills, required.
• Strong written and verbal communications skills required.
• Large group and small group presentation ability, required.
• Legal practice experience, preferred.
• Ability to maintain confidentiality pursuant to FERPA and other regulations, required.
• Ability to conduct basic statistical analysis, preferred.
• Experience with SUCOL Academic Success program, preferred.
• Experience with the SUCOL Bar Preparation Program, preferred.

Skills and Knowledge

• Sound judgment and discretion sufficient to build relationships with students, alumni, and colleagues that foster trust and cooperation.
• Ability to develop rapport with students in an individual counseling setting. Ability to complete tasks in an expeditious and courteous manner.
• Ability to collaborate to build highly effective bar exam outcomes, while also promoting harmony within the office.
• Sufficiently strong minded to impart unambiguous directions to students who need motivation, both in law school and on the bar exam.
• Maintains a collaborative work environment and works well with others.
• Must establish and maintain positive working relationships within department and within the College of Law.
• Works to build an environment that promotes and facilitates the success of Diversity and Inclusive Excellence.
• Must be a dependable, responsible contributor committed to excellence and success.
• Flexibility to work outside the normal assigned schedule when requested.

Responsibilities

Bar Exam Counseling and Advising:

• Provides academic advising on course selection and planning.
• Guides students on the path to licensure from bar exam application through preparation.
• Coaches at-risk students identified by COL metrics.
• Counsels on study techniques, exam prep, and course choices.
• Reviews student work to improve bar writing and preparation strategies.
• Meets with graduating students to create individualized bar exam plans.
• Develops and delivers bar preparation workshops covering long-range planning and exam skills.
• Answers student questions on bar exam applications across U.S. jurisdictions.
• Collaborates with Kaplan Bar Review to implement the institutional agreement and deliver comprehensive services.
• Assists alumni with study plans, coaching them through meetings, essay reviews, and performance feedback.

Bar Exam Success Programming:

• Develops and presents comprehensive and supplemental bar preparation workshops tailored to support students and alumni prepare for the Uniform Bar Exam and the NextGen Bar Exam.
• Focuses workshop content on the skills and strategies needed to pass the Uniform Bar Exam or the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam while addressing any future reforms.
• Integrates programming with COL traditional and interactive distance education learning models, ensuring all students receive personalized support.
• Designs and implements comprehensive programming to support bar exam retakers particularly those who have not passed a bar exam within two years of graduation.

Data Collection:

• Collaborates to engage in bar exam data collection and analysis for purposes of internal and external reporting.
• Develops and implements formative assessment tools to evaluate the impact of first-time bar taker preparation and remedial programming efforts.

Administrative Tasks:

• Oversees and maintains the COL exam administration process.
• Assists in planning and presenting at New Student Orientation.
• Participates in campus-wide initiatives in collaboration with other student services offices at the College of Law to provide a comprehensive and meaningful academic experience for COL students.
• Other duties as assigned.

Interested candidates can access the full job description and apply for the position using this link: https://www.sujobopps.com/postings/110962

Many law students start exam prep the month (or sometimes weeks) before final exams. This often includes a heavy focus on outlining (or creating study tools) and maybe a few practice problems, spurred from the thought “Oh crap! My final is next month!”

Instead, exam prep should be a consistent practice that law students start now—within the first several weeks of classes starting. Starting exam prep now means reducing the time pressure trying to relearn concepts from nearly ten weeks ago. Starting exam prep now means fitting in consistent time for practice problems, rather than hoping to cram in at least one practice test before the exam. Starting exam prep means reducing the anxiety tied to final exams.

What does consistent exam prep look like this early in the semester?

• Create Your Own Outline or Study Tool: Creating an outline (or what I now like to call a “study tool” because outlining can have a negative connotation for some) allows you to review what you’ve learned, synthesize & process concepts, and draw connections between them. Plus, starting a study tool early allows you more time to condense it as you better understand the law. You should absolutely create your own study tool (or outline) to take advantage of these important cognitive tasks, rather than relying on one from an upper-level student. For creating your study tool, if you are a first-year student, this process can start about four to five weeks into the semester; if you’re an upper-level law student, this process starts after the first two weeks of the semester. That time is here—so get started!

• Chunk Your Learning: When law students are in “exam mode” that month before finals, they can get so overwhelmed trying to get it all learned and memorized. However, starting earlier—now—allows you to study more purposefully and thoughtfully. And chunking learning means dividing a topic, such as Intentional Torts into its sub-parts like Battery, Assault, False Imprisonment, and so on, can make that task completion much more digestible. So, after a professor completes a major issue or sub-issue (a “unit”) in class, you should immediately review and add that to your study tool. Think of this like a grocery list. If you had a grocery list of 50 items, you might get overwhelmed trying to remember where things are and miss items; but if you put all your produce items together since that’s where your grocery store starts, and then deli items next, and so on, you’ll be much less likely to miss things and stay on track.

• Complete Practice Problems to Check Your Learning: Practice problems are scary. Perhaps not Halloween scary, but the thought of getting a question wrong, or even several questions wrong in a row, can be very scary for law students. However, science shows that completing practice problems is not only active learning that helps students to better understand their knowledge gaps,[1] but is also a tool to help reduce test anxiety.[2] For example, by doing practice questions now, you can assess what you know and what you don’t, remediate the topics you don’t know, and keep practicing and learning. However, for a student who saves practice until their outline is perfect[3] or right before the exam, that student will not be able to close their knowledge gaps and is less likely to see the success they desire. Therefore, you should use multiple choice and short answer questions in a supplement (again in “chunks”) to best test your knowledge on those discrete topics. Doing this will allow this exam prep early will allow you to get to several larger issue-spotter practice questions in the weeks before the final exam.

• Modifications Based on Professor Preferences: Law school supplements are not made for specific professors’ classes; they’re made for students across the country to understand the law and practice applying it to new sets of facts. Sure, your professor will likely emphasize some key areas of law and skip over others. They will likely also want your essay product written a specific way. So, when you use a study aid supplement your school has available, do practice questions on those topics your professor has covered and skip over those your professor has not. If while doing practice questions, you realize that the answer does not seem right or you think your professor would address it differently, approach them about it and get clarification. Again, by starting the process earlier, you are able to make the small adjustments necessary before test day and build your confidence.

• Ask for Help Early & Often: Similarly, as you work on your study tool and complete practice questions, ask for help. Remember, each exam you take at the end of the semester will test information differently and expect slightly different outputs. Your course professors and academic success professors are available (and happy) to help answer your questions now, so let them help you along the way.

So, as you get started, remember that carving out even an extra hour or two for exam prep now can mean the difference between being prepared for an exam in ten weeks and just hoping that you’re exam ready. So, choose the way that builds learning, feedback, and confidence to ace your final exams this semester!

(Erica M. Lux)

[1] See, e.g., Jennifer M. Cooper & Regan A. R. Gurung, Smarter Law Study Habits: An Empirical Analysis of Law Learning Strategies & Relationship with Law GPA, 62 St. Louis Univ. L. J. 361 (2018); Jennifer A. Gundlach & Jessica R. Santangelo, Teaching & Assessing Metacognition in Law School, 69(1) J. Legal Educ. 156 (2019).

[2] Sarah M. Bonner, Breaking the Test-Anxiety Loop: Using Self-Regulated Learning to Improve Bar Exam Performance, 91(4) The Bar Examiner (2022–2023), https://thebarexaminer.ncbex.org/article/winter-2022-2023/breaking-the-test-anxiety-loop/ (discussing how using self-regulated learning with practice tests can help reduce test anxiety in bar prep).

[3] There is no such thing as a perfect outline.

Every year, Academic and Bar Success Departments must engage in conversations with other faculty and campus administration to request resources. This may look like requesting faculty participation in a workshop, collaboration on an academic success initiative, or asking for financial investments into academic and bar programming.

Given faculty’s tight scheduling commitments and institutional financial constraints, we may hear the word “no” in response to our requests. Accepting “no” often means missed opportunities to further explore alternative options and can result in an increase to our own workload.

A potential solution: when making an “ask,” engage in integrative bargaining. Integrative bargaining promotes collaboration and assist parties in finding “win-win” solutions as opposed to positional bargaining which is results in “win-loss” solutions.

Successful integrative bargainers focus on the underlying positions as a means to “expand the pie” before “dividing the pie.” By engaging in this approach to problem solving, you create an environment that is more likely to yield sustained, long-lasting solutions because most, if not all parties, find a “win.”

To best achieve results in integrative bargaining, one must focus on the underlying interests versus the stated positions. Stated positions are the factually asserted “wants” and “needs.” The underlying interests are the motivations for the asserted positions. Asking open-ended questions (which I explored in a previous post) illicit information that you can then use to identify underlying interests. Once you identify the other party’s underlying interests, you can then craft proposals that meet those interests and thus satisfy the stated positions.

Let us examine a simple hypothetical to see how integrative bargaining can better assist your communication.

You need faculty participation in your summer bar workshop series. You approach a faculty member beloved by the students and ask for their participation. The faculty member quickly states that they do not have time during the summer to host a workshop, and politely declines your request.

Positional bargaining results in you accepting the no and moving on to another faculty member. However, integrative bargaining uses active listening to identify the faculty’s underlying motivation to say “no” (in this case, time limitations) to propose a few alternative solutions. These alternatives solutions include a prerecorded workshop that they could complete on their own time during the spring semester, a handwritten postcard that you can share with the students on their behalf, or a short-prerecorded video reminding the students of three key concepts to refresh during bar study.

These alternative solutions better support your underlying motivations (student support and building a positive bar culture) for your stated position (faculty involvement). The alternative solutions also support the faculty’s underlying motivation (scheduling constraints) for their stated position (“no”.) The mentioned alternatives “expand the pie,” provide opportunity to further discussion, and an increase the likelihood of generating a better solution rather than accepting “no” for an answer.

Thus, integrative bargaining is another key communication strategy to add to your ASP/Bar toolbox.

In summary, the next time you make an ask, be an integrative bargainer and do the following:

1. Identify, prepare and list your underlying motivations for your ask.

2. When presenting the requests, ask open-ended, probative questions and actively listen for your counter’s expression of underlying interests.

3. Translate you and your counterparts underlying interests into creative solution proposals. (“expand the pie”)

4. Once creative solutions are on the table, then determine which solution(s) might work best. (“divide the pie”).

(Amy Vaughan-Thomas)