When the University of Sydney Law School announced that it was discontinuing its award-winning Peer-Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) in May last year, many students were surprised and disappointed. PASS offered students in their first-to-third years of their law degree a structured way of revising course content, led by high-achieving student facilitators. Since its cancellation, law students have been left without equivalent support, as they waited for PASS’ replacement to be designed and announced.
Fifteen months later, that replacement will be put into place this semester. But it remains to be seen whether student concerns about the Law School’s academic support will be alleviated by the new mentoring program, named “mentoring for success”.
The new program will operate differently to the old PASS. Instead of subject-specific support, it will be based on a mentor-mentee model, which provides social support and general skills for academic life at university. It will initially be available to first-year students only, with an expansion not yet certain.
When announcing PASS’ cancellation in 2022, Law School Dean Simon Bronitt and Associate Dean of Student Life Roger Magnusson took issue with its model — Bronitt said that data held by the Law School showed PASS was not reaping its intended benefit; Magnusson claimed PASS targeted “middle class” students receiving average marks and that its replacement should target struggling students.
The data referred to by Bronitt is yet to be seen by students. Sydney University Law Society (SULS) President Naz Sharifi confirmed to Honi that the SULS Executive has not been presented with this data, or any evidence that PASS was ineffective. In contrast, although they also were not privy to this data, multiple PASS facilitators told Honi that they received positive feedback from students of all abilities.
In response to Honi’s question whether “mentoring for success” would in fact specifically target struggling students, a University spokesperson said that the program would be “aimed at increasing student retention and completion rates.” That is PR-speak for “yes”. Sharifi further confirmed to Honi that “mentoring for success” won’t be compulsory for struggling students, but it would only be available to them: the Faculty will identify students in need of extra support. According to Sharifi, the Law School originally considered making the program compulsory for these students, but changed its mind after lobbying from SULS.
However, Christine*, a former PASS attendee-turned-facilitator, expressed her concerns about such a model, saying that a program targeted at students at risk of failing risked “outing” those students.
With PASS, Christine said, “there is no labelling. You could be here because you’re a top student who wants to brush up on your skills, or you could be a middle-class student who kind of gets it but needs some more help or you could be a struggling student.
“No one knows that.”
Even if outing is not an issue, Christine said “to be told by the Law School that you are a struggling student, and you need to take this program, can be really motivating and really discouraging.
“If I had been one of those students, it would have been a serious whack to my confidence.”
Additionally, it is unclear why supporting struggling students is mutually exclusive with designing a program which supports all students. As Christine told Honi, “students at the middle and even at the top deserve support. Just because they are not struggling does not mean that they shouldn’t be given resources to do better.”
There are a range of alternate support mechanisms offered to students, apart from PASS and its successor. The University spokesperson noted the Law School’s offering of financial support in the form of scholarships for financially disadvantaged students, and academic support through the Legal Writing and Language Club, as well as a series of seminars run by academics on exam skills.
These offerings are clearly popular: the University said a recent seminar saw 150 participants. A third-year student, Ella*, who regularly attends the Legal Writing and Language Club told Honi: “The law school’s current offerings such as legal writing language club and the proposed PASS replacement to help students at risk of failing units are certainly valuable, however, they serve different purposes and demographics than PASS did.
“Support-focused programs like PASS which review content taught in class are still highly valuable for law students. The historically very high level of demand for PASS in law by itself supports the fact that students find it valuable to their learning, and that it should not have been cancelled by the law school.”
The popularity of these sessions indicates a burgeoning demand for academic support provided by the Law School; PASS was regularly fully booked at the beginning of each Semester. However, these forms of academic support differ from PASS in a key way: whereas they are focussed on skills such as exam technique and legal writing, PASS specifically helped students revise the content studied each semester. Christine noted that “law is clearly a very content heavy subject… but a lot of time spent in class is spent learning firsthand, so being able to go back and review what you’ve learnt solidifies this.”
Mentoring for success does away with this specific support. Leaving students without any access to content-specific support.
The other, less spoken about, benefit of a regular system of academic support such as PASS is its ability to mediate the competitive environment which surrounds studying Law at USyd.
“[PASS’] value is that it is based upon a collaborative model. If you’re not willing to share your resources and contribute, it’s not going to work. It’s adverse to competition, which gives you for the first time an environment which isn’t competitive,” Christine said.
Ella agreed, saying that “in a University context that is increasingly socially disconnected and competitive, small group settings where students can go over content taught in class can allow them to clarify complex concepts and learn collaboratively. This kind of teaching approach is unique to PASS in the law school and not recreated by regular unit content.”
It is unclear if mentoring for success, with a one-on-one model, will be able to construct such a welcoming environment, based on collaboration with students of all abilities.
The decision to initially only offer “mentoring for success” to first-year students means that other students, in second year and beyond, will be left without content-specific academic support, or even the new program’s social support, that the Law School’s other offerings cannot replace. This led Sharifi, on behalf of the SULS Executive, to say that SULS advocates “for the implementation of a PASS alternative that is accessible to all students and caters to all skill and year levels.” This may yet be forthcoming, but the delay has clearly frustrated students.
The University spokesperson added that during the design of PASS’ replacement “students have been consulted and kept updated, in particular through the Student Staff Consultative Forum” and in engagement with SULS and the Chinese Law Students Society.
However, Sharifi said that the “Faculty provided SULS with initial details at the Student Staff Consultative Forum, yet did not provide opportunities for the Society to be involved in active design or incorporate the significant concerns of SULS representatives. In April 2023, SULS received an update on the finalised program and was asked for suggestions on its name only. This marked the first time that SULS was invited to give input after the initial conversations in 2022.”
Perhaps the Law School realised the name “mentoring for success” needed some workshopping. Honi agrees. Students could have helped with more than that, though.
The abrupt cancellation of PASS, and the concern that it provoked among the student body — and the haphazard way its replacement has been designed and announced — may not be the biggest issue with USyd at the moment. But it should not be too much to ask for regular academic support, accessible to all years and abilities, and for students to be listened to in shaping the nature of this support, at the Law School or in any other faculty in the University. USyd was recently ranked the third-worst university in Australia for the student experience: students feel isolated and often unsupported in the post-COVID university. Avoiding another PASS saga, and expanding the academic support available to students, would go some way in ameliorating that.