After a gruelling and grisly few years of completing “Priestley 11” subjects, the 11 core units universal to all law schools in Australia, enervated law students are impatient to select their elective units. These subjects greatly influence their career path, branching out into Media or Family Law. However, every year, students are turned away at the door from prized electives. Forced to opt for entirely different subjects in order to complete their degree, students leave the Law School dissatisfied and disadvantaged. Whatever for?
Central University has a policy against setting caps on classes, but many schools do this regardless. Various law professors understand the situation regarding elective caps in the Law School differently, a testament to the puzzling nature of the policy and its execution. USyd professors complain that the rule is “set arbitrarily” and that there is “no general consultation”, stripping academics of a say.
According to one law professor, the existence of quotas serve a variety of purposes including ensuring that subjects with less popularity remain filled, avoiding the need to assess why these subjects are less popular.
However, following a slap on the wrist from Central University management, the Law School must devise crafty methods to reduce the number of students in popular elective courses. A law professor explains that one slapdash method involves booking rooms with small seating capacities for sought-after subjects. If a subject is full, a student must ask for special permission. As a result, lecturers of popular subjects are inundated with requests.
However, another law professor shared one impulse behind capped classes: the educational benefits of “small” class sizes. Law subjects at USyd are often taught in seminars, rather than tutorials, of up to 60 students, which hampers group discussion. It is hardly “small”. At other universities, law schools often cap seminars or tutorials at 30 students to enhance the learning experience.
So perhaps the issue isn’t capping classes to be smaller, the professor explains, but how this practice affects the student experience based on current circumstances.
The problem behind elective caps now is that student numbers have dramatically increased and the Law School needs to make provisions for electives as well as core units. In the 2024 cohort, there are almost 700 first-year LLB and JD students, due to a significant uptick in offers from years before. Despite the rise in student number, the faculty has not hired a substantially higher number of staff or staff who have the knowledge to teach the popular electives.
The professor warned that “a tsunami is coming”, and as a result, “the faculty needs to prepare and needs to start putting on more classes”. Of course, putting on more, smaller classes costs money — but the alternative comes at a cost to the student experience. As the professor summarises, “We have lots of discussion about how to be a Top 10 Law School, but never a comprehensive discussion about how to give the best education to the students we’ve got.”
Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and Juris Doctor (JD) students are allowed to enrol in a maximum of 24 credit points of Master’s electives in their final year, however there are minimum spots pre-allocated for these students in these classes. This theoretically expands a student’s elective possibilities, and enables them to take a more specific route in line with career aspirations.
An LLB student told Honi Soit that there was a maximum of five spots for LLBs and JDs in the Master’s subject they took. They recalled a teacher describing how they would receive so many emails from students wishing to take the class that they had been advised to forward all their emails to an administrative staff member in the faculty to deal with. This functionally means that undergraduate students need to apply for permission to take the Master’s unit on the first day that enrolment opens in order to be competitive; often without knowing that this is needed until they’ve taken the class. One professor thinks this cap on LLB and JD students enrolling in Master’s subjects needs to be revised: final year LLB and JD students perform very well in Master’s subjects, they are already graduates in another degree, and it would open up more choice for students, particularly in popular fields where they might have been locked out by caps.
A University spokesperson told Honi that capping “certain electives” was “in direct response to student feedback, which highlights the need to prioritise teacher-student interactions and support, student engagement in their learning, and building a stronger sense of belonging for students.”
“Students have also identified the need for their learning to provide more opportunities for skill development including, spoken communication skills and teamwork, ” the spokesperson continued, “large classes in core and elective units make it more challenging to provide students with such opportunities and experience.”
According to the spokesperson, the Law School is “currently undertaking an elective review” that will “ensure that our elective programs offer the right mix of options to meet student demand, their diverse learning needs and staff expertise.”
Developing a curriculum requires a balance of many considerations — however, faculties should ensure that student experience and student choice are not factors relegated to the background. Elective choice significantly determines a student’s enjoyment of their degree, and restrictions on it recall the University’s broader treatment of student decision-making as dangerous, rather than liberating. With the Law School left as one of the few faculties that offers wide elective choice, it would be a step in the wrong direction to fell this sentinel.
