They arrive with high grades and plenty of ambition, so why do so few law students leave university with a first-class degree?

MPs investigating standards in higher education have recently called attention to the growing proportion of firsts being awarded by universities. In law, however, 6.7 per cent of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland graduated with a first in 2007-08. This compares with 21.5 per cent of engineering and technology students, 19.9 per cent of those in the physical sciences and 14.2 per cent who opt for creative arts and design.

In a paper for the Quality Assurance Agency, the university standards watchdog, to be published this autumn, Mantz Yorke, a visiting professor at the University of Lancaster, writes: “Data of this sort prompt questions such as, ‘Why is it apparently so difficult for law students to get firsts, in comparison to students in engineering and technology? It seems unlikely that entry qualifications will provide the answer.”

So is law really tougher? “Law is, relatively and absolutely speaking, a ‘hard’ degree, requiring both raw knowledge and high-level analytical skills,” John White, head of the school of human sciences and law at Buckinghamshire New University, says. It is made more challenging still because many students have never studied the subject before embarking on their course.

Last year at The City Law School, firsts were in single figures. It can take time to acquire the skills a lawyer needs and it is a discipline in which there is no “right” answer, says Claire de Than, director of the undergraduate LLB at City. A qualifying law degree also requires students to take subjects in a wide range of areas — including those they may not enjoy. “Straight As at A level don’t guarantee a first-class degree,” she says. “A good lawyer has to be a whole package — he or she has to be a linguist, a researcher and have scientific analysis skills. To be all-round excellent at very different things is very rare.”

Others point to workload, the requirements of professional bodies and the number of high-stakes exams. Panu Minkkinen, head of law at the University of Leicester, says the pressure of law exams — he refers to students fainting and vomiting with stress — may lead some to underachieve.

Nationally, 51.3 per cent of law students achieve a 2.1 and, Minkkinen says, that is the level most try to reach. He says it is “only those who want to pursue the barrister route and are looking for pupillages with distinguished chambers” who aspire to a first.

Owain Blackwell, LLB programme leader at the University of Bolton, advises the academically ambitious to “go beyond what everybody else is doing”. But, he claims, law lecturers rarely used the full range of marks, from 0 to 100, and this punishes students who do particularly well. “Most don’t give marks beyond 75. Lecturers get nosebleeds if they go towards 80,” he says.

Meanwhile, the way that different law schools calculate a first-class degree varies, so students should make sure that they know how their department’s classification system works. Minkkinen cautiously suggests another possibility. “There might even be some notion of self-importance in law schools — the idea that ‘we don’t award students firsts’. There might be an aspect of that. I don’t know.”

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