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Two 'Legal Recruit' books on online tests for law students, pub date 1 Nov 2011
It is important to note that, whilst ‘Legal Recruit’ is an important key initiative from the BPP Legal Awareness Society to encourage a business culture in law, ‘Legal Recruit’ is absolutely nothing to do with BPP media, nor indeed represents any official teaching or guidance from BPP.
Book 1 – Practical verbal reasoning questions for law students (111 pages)
This book has carefully designed verbal reasoning questions, of the ‘True’, ‘False’, or ‘Cannot Say’ variety. Two questions follow each of the passages together with full explanations, and reading passages cover a variety of subjects, including biology, business, economics, education, engineering, environment, geography, geology, health and safety, human relations, medicine, modern languages, physics, technology, and transport. Readers of this title will benefit from the general explanation as to how to do these tests, and from the worked examples, such that they feel much more comfortable when they come to do such tests for real for training contract or vacation placement applications. The book will also be also of interest for applicants to corporates who use these tests for recruitment purposes. This title has a publication date of 1 November 2011, and is only available to download for £7.50 from the Legal Recruit website.
Book 2 – Practical situational judgements questions for law students (77 pages)
This book has carefully-designed questions in six competences commonly assessed in situational judgement tests. Situational judgement tests are used by some law firms to ascertain the suitability of a law student for a training contract. These competences are problem solving, proactive attitude, commitment to excellence, communication and negotiation, teamwork, and attention-to-detail and leadership. The book will also be also of interest for applicants to corporates who use these tests for recruitment purposes. Getting focused on these competences will help law students to understand the relevance of these skills to recruitment and their general professional life. This title has a publication date of 1 November 2011, and is only available to download for £7.50 from the Legal Recruit website.
A new free sample practice test to help law students excel at online applications assessments
I will be launching my new website ‘Legal Recruit’ to help law students become really good at two of the most important online assessments for legal recruitment.
These are currently verbal reasoning tests and situational judgement tests.
It’s essential you practice these before doing them ‘for real’ through online training contract and vacation scheme applications in the City corporate firms.
I believe that it’s a shame for students to come a cropper on these tests, and not get called for interview, even if they meet interview requirements elsewhere, such as II.1 or relevant vacation scheme placement. A colleague of mine – very well-known, in fact – refers to this phenomenon as “death by spreadsheet”.
The new website is here http://legal-recruit.org/.
I have been working extremely hard on it the last few weeks. Please feel to look around. Some of the features – like the main assessment ‘zone’ – are disabled, as I have not formally launched this yet.
For those who are interested in some of the relevant theory and evidence underlying this new website designed for law students, you might like to go to this blog http://legalrecruit.org/. I keep this blog up-to-date with useful info. There’s also a twitter thread on which I put up interesting stuff, including stories of the type which could easily feature in a verbal reasoning test, ranging from geology to technology: http://twitter.com/#!/legal_recruit.
If you go to http://legal-recruit.org/, you will see there’s a toolbar ‘about the tests’. If you go there, you’ll then see another toolbar, and if you go to any of the pages there, you’ll be able to download a free factsheet.
If you click register http://legal-recruit.org/register/ you will then be invited to sign-up. Sign-up involves you suggesting a username, and you’ll be sent a password by email to an e-mail address you suggest. You can then use the username and password to login (using the login button in the top-right corner) http://legal-recruit.org/wp-login.php.
Once you login, you’ll be able to do the trial http://legal-recruit.org/trial/. You should only do the trial if you are indeed of graduate level, i.e. you have graduated.
This is a practice test which gives you a very good idea how a real asssessment of the type routinely done for real training contract applications. After you do this test, you’ll be able to look at a full report as to how you do did.
You’ll know I have a bugbear about legal recruiters not entering into the letter of the law (or spirit more often) regarding ‘reasonable adjustments’ for tests. This website will allow you to alter the text-size meaning that some law students will not needlessly suffer in struggling to read the questions. For the practice assessments to be offered on my site from 1 November 2011, registered users will be able to vary the time that they can take for each test from 19 minutes to 39 minutes. You can read more about this here if you’re interested.
After taking the test, you’ll be confidentially be able to read the report on this link (if you’re logged in). Don’t worry – nobody else gets to see this report, not even us!
ALL OF THIS PRACTICE IS FOR FREE – ENJOY!
Gazelles
This is a typical question, one of 300, which I am writing for my practice verbal reasoning platform.
12 Young, fast-growing businesses are more likely to have their loan applications rejected in Britain than in any other leading country in Europe, according to European Union figures. So-called “gazelles” — small, dynamic enterprises that are only a handful of years old — had a harder time clinching bank loans than in other top Western European nations last year, Eurostat numbers showed. The British rejection rate was 35.6 percent last year, up from 6.8 percent in 2007, according to data released this month. Among the larger EU nations, the only countries that came close were Denmark and the Netherlands, where failure rates on loan applications were 32 percent and 29 percent, respectively. The number of rejections among small British information and communications technology companies was particularly high, at 38.4 percent.
‘Gazelles’ sometimes turn into ‘large antelopes’, in business terms – these are large, incumbent companies with much inertia.
CANNOT SAY. No reference is given to the term ‘large antelopes’ in this passage.
The Netherlands have the third highest rejection rate in the whole of Europe for successfully obtaining bank loans in Europe.
CANNOT SAY. Whilst this is possible from the passage, it cannot be stated as a fact, particularly since the passage strictly speaking refers to countries in Western Europe.
BPP Legal Awareness Society at the BPP Students Association Freshers' Fair 2011
Majid and I had had a great time on the invitation of Laila and Madelaine (@MadelainePower) at the BPP Students Association Freshers’ Fair 2011. Here we are at our stall [photo kindly taken by the President of the BPP Literature Society]. Majid’s the good-looking one on the left, btw.
It was held yesterday (Wednesday 28th September 2011) at the BPP Law School. We were representing the BPP Legal Awareness Society which we run for all students of BPP, across all sites. We are based at @BPPBusiness which is at St Mary Axe.
Thank you very much, Laila and Madelaine, for the invites. They are the current and former CEO of Students at the BPP Students Association. It was really nice to see the other exhibitors, especially Harry who runs the BPP Commercial Awareness Society at the BPP Law School. Through a stroke of genius, Laila and Madeleine put us next-door to the BPP Football Society, which was packed all afternoon with predominantly male law students and their girlfriends – importantly for the ‘success’ of our initiatives, learners who were about to do the GDL or LLB, LLM, or LPC, and who were interested in excelling in their training contract application for corporate firms. I found that some people who were interested in blogging for us were not the typical people who wished to do it for CV points to demonstrate ‘commercial awareness’ and ‘teamwork’. As I have become highly cynical about the quality of legal recruitment in the major corporate firms of London, this surprised me. I found instead many learners who wished to blog about their experiences in social law, which really pleased me as I am devoted to my pro bono at a London law centre. How they fair in their application to fee-earning corporates is anyone’s guess, however.
This was the ‘calm before the storm’, but it was packed when we got going at 2 pm.
The new website of the BPP Students Association (accessible here) is incredibly useful, and very easy to navigate around. It has very useful information for current students across all sites, including a valuable ‘heads up’ on news about accommodation, alumni, careers, clubs and societies, disability and dyslexia, funding, international student support, student discounts, ‘student support’ and ‘student voice’, and welfare, inter alia.
We presented our twitter feed on our laptop at our stall ‘live’ (https://twitter.com/#!/legalaware) and our laminated posters included Poster of the live Twitter feed the twitter feed and Blog information poster how to contribute copy for this blog to demonstrate to legal recruiters that you demonstrate teamwork and commercial awareness).
We are also able to recruit for our new psychometric tool we’re introducing to help law students ‘crack’ the SHL verbal reasoning tests almost used ubiquitously for the election of candidates for training contracts and vacation placements (https://twitter.com/#!/legal_recruit).
Details about taking part for free on the Gumtree website can be found here.
