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A soon-to-be fresher in a 2019 posed the above question and was met with a mix of responses. These ranged from readers claiming that a Law degree still remains “challenging”, to others maintaining they are now, “easier than they have ever been”. With this disparity in mind, I have set out to discover whether students at the University of Bristol, can help clarify these differing views.

Although my research has been limited: to the rigour of the Law degree at the University of Bristol, by its qualitative nature, and additionally due to the COVID-19 outbreak, I managed to interview seven Law and seven non-Law students. 

On average, the seven non-Law students ranked the difficulty of their respective degrees, ranging from History to Computer Science, on a scale of 1 to 10, as a 6.3. This seemed a surprisingly low result, and was compounded by the non-Law students’ estimation that Law would rank an average of 8.3 /10 on the same difficulty scale. Although these students have not studied the subject, the seven Law students that have, estimated its toughness to be a 7.8 /10, comparable to the non-Law students’ approximation, if slightly lower.

Each interviewee was asked a further question, what did they think were the top five hardest degree subjects? 10 out of the 14 students surveyed placed Law in their top five. However, only two students believed Law to be the most difficult subject, with Medicine and subjects allied to it, frequently cited as the most difficult.

Clearly, there is a perception that Law is a challenging subject, both from those who study it and those who do not. This is backed up by which indicates Law is one of the hardest degrees in which to obtain a first. Less than 13.4% of Law students do so, compared to the national average across degrees of 26%. However, this is partly compensated for with the fact that the percentage of 2:1s for Law is 8% higher than the average, (58% and 50% respectively). Perhaps most contrary to public perception, students studying subjects allied to Medicine achieved a high first-rate of 28%.

Such a high discrepancy in grades may be put down to the subjective vs objective nature of humanities or social sciences and STEM subjects. It should also be noted that there are few degrees outside of STEM that require the mastery of databases, such as LexisLibrary, that are entirely new to you upon entering first year, a challenge highlighted by a one student interviewed.

To conclude, Law is believed to be a rigorous, academic subject by both Law and non-Law students, with the amount of reading and high workload cited as a key issue by both groups. However, as many Law students pointed out, although tough, with good time management skills and self-motivation it is possible to succeed. Whilst neither of these skills are easy to obtain, a Law degree is at least in this sense like any other, it is what you make of it!