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We are past the point of turning a blind eye to the fact that too many law students don’t attend classes regularly, writes Professor Luke Beck.
Large proportions of law students often never attend scheduled classes. The legal profession is expressing increasing concern about the quality of law graduates’ knowledge and soft skills, such as collaboration and interpersonal communication. These things seem related. But proposed changes to law degree accreditation rules are unlikely to solve these problems.
The Law Admissions Consultative Committee’s current review of the Accreditation Standards for Australian Law Courses presents an opportunity to design and implement a solution. One of the main changes proposed by the review is to emphasise that “the design of the law course and its program of instruction” for both in-person and online law degrees must involve a minimum number of hours of active learning and direct interaction between teacher and student.
This is a good idea. It responds directly to the profession’s exhortations to emphasise human interaction in legal education. And in days where 80 per cent of university students use generative AI but research shows it often harms deep learning, active learning approaches and human interaction may be more important than ever.
But it doesn’t matter how well a law degree is designed if, in practice, students don’t come to class regularly to engage in that well-designed human interaction and active learning.
Of course, university students have always skipped class from time to time. That’s not a problem. But across Australia, many university students simply never come to class.
This is not a law student phenomenon specifically. The University of Tasmania told a 2024 parliamentary inquiry that “[p]ublished data from leading Australian universities shows attendance often fails to reach 60 per cent even at the start of semester and falls below 30 per cent as the semester progresses.”
There’s a genre of news articles lamenting student loneliness and what’s lost educationally and socially as a result of students not coming to class. These articles sometimes include interviews with law students. A 2025 piece in The Guardian featured an interview with a law student. A similar 2026 piece in The Sydney Morning Herald featured an interview with another law student. Both pieces make the observation that poor student attendance creates a “vicious cycle” of making coming to class ever less appealing: who would want to attend class pretty much alone?
We cannot blame individual students for this situation. Youth Allowance is at below poverty line rates, and students need to work to survive. Some have caring and other obligations.
In the past, a student with outside commitments might have taken three rather than four subjects per semester in order to balance their commitments. Importantly, three subjects per semester still satisfy Youth Allowance eligibility rules.
Some students tell me they are reluctant to reduce their study load to balance other commitments. Not because it might add an extra six months to complete the degree, but because they believe the profession values graduates who attempt full-time study while working three or four days a week, even though there are not enough hours in the week to do both properly. In proof of that belief being well-founded, they point to the fact that so many other students are structuring their lives like that. Another vicious cycle, it seems.
Some law schools leverage law students’ (unhealthy) obsession with marks and incentivise attendance (and the learning and social benefits it leads to) by dedicating a small proportion of marks to in-class participation. Of course, mere attendance is not participation, but you can’t participate in class discussions and activities if you don’t attend. My own experience shows this works. The Monash JD has 10 per cent class participation marks for all core units (much to the chagrin of some university executives who would prefer maximum “flexibility” for students) but the Monash LLB does not. My JD class this year had pretty much full attendance every week. My LLB class had approximately 60 per cent attendance in the best week. Many colleagues experience far worse attendance.
Law schools and their leaders are not autonomous: they must work within the structures and priorities set by their universities. Beefing up attendance requirements for one university’s law degree might provide opportunities for rival universities to market “flexibility” to potential future students. Few universities would allow their law school to create a risk of reduced future enrolment numbers or hand a marketing advantage to competitors.
And universities generally are hardly likely to encourage students to reduce the number of subjects they take each semester. Reducing from four to three subjects per semester represents a one-quarter reduction in annual revenue from the student. Reduced study loads at scale would cause significant financial issues for universities.
Whether such commercial considerations inform university-wide policies and student FAQs at some institutions to the effect that “face-to-face attendance is not mandatory” except in limited circumstances, such as being a requirement for professional accreditation, and “[only] some subjects have compulsory attendance requirements” is hard to say.
If the profession genuinely believes that the study of law requires human interaction, and if the accreditation standards require law degrees to be designed for human interaction and active learning, and if we accept that non-attendance is a problem and one that is a structural issue rather than an individual student or law school issue, then we need a structural solution.
Nothing in the new Draft Accreditation Standards requires law schools to provide any information to accreditors about whether students actually experience and undertake the degree as designed and as accredited. They probably should.
International students are subject to a visa condition requiring attendance at 80 per cent of scheduled classes. This might provide a model for the Accreditation Standards. (Oddly, TAFEs are required to monitor and enforce this requirement, but universities are not.)
Similar rules exist overseas. The American Bar Association’s Law School Accreditation Standards requires US law schools to mandate “regular class attendance”. The Bar Council of India’s Legal Education Rules require Indian law degrees to have a minimum 70 per cent class attendance requirement.
Alternatively, the Accreditation Standards could be tweaked to include a requirement for providers of law courses to explain how they ensure students actually participate in the prescribed minimum hours of active learning and human interaction.
But surely we are past the point of turning a blind eye to the fact that too many law students don’t attend classes regularly. It’s certainly not benefiting students, and it’s not conducive to maintaining public confidence in the profession.
Luke Beck is a professor and past associate dean (education) in the faculty of law at Monash University.
