Spring 2022 Course Evaluations

What aspect(s) of the course or instruction could be improved?

Its great! too much busy work throughout the year. Time logs should be less formal, for example. Skill development journal felt trivial. I didn’t find the class on wrongful convictions as effective as other classes (the class before Sean Ellis spoke with us). Perhaps this class could be combined with another class and we could have a class that discussed/focused on trial strategy/prep? I wish we had more lead time on assignments. Material often doesn’t get posted until a week before the class. I wish it was available sooner, especially for group assignments that require coordination among 5+ people. Some of the assignments, less so this semester than last semester which was a nice improvement, are too much like busy work. Doing a mock motion to suppress would be nice. I think one thing that was difficult for me was the discussion with Sean Ellis, it was an incredibly one sided discussion which I think was very obvious that a lot of people had extremely negative misconceptions about the way a prosecutor operates. I was not surprised that not a single prosecutor’s clinic student even asked a question. I think it would have helped to get more balance there because we didn’t focus on what happened in his trials and where the miscarriage of justice was, and how prosecutors can fix that. I think students should be made aware that the semesters are lopsided when it comes to work. It was not an issue that the first semester was crazy busy but would have been better to be told that prior to the clinic starting.

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