You thought you were ready for law school, didn’t you? When you were in college, you took the intro to contracts and your history courses all covered constitutional law. You received high grades in those and other related classes. By all accounts, you should have hit the ground running, when law school began. So what happened?You may have found out that what they teach in college does not rise to the level of that first year contracts or torts class. You might have found out that the constitution is a lot more than just the bill of rights. However, the biggest thing you found out was, law school is a lot tougher than you imagined it would be.

Well, there are ways to make this experience easier. For starters, briefing cases does not need to turn into an all night experience. If you have a west law account, try the brief it section. Your law professors may not like it, but the bottom line is, you will learn a lot more about a case in the class and the law which stems from that case, if you have at least a brief (no pun intended) understanding of what the case really is about.

One regulation that affects distance learning is the Fifty Percent Rule. Created in 1992 and still current today, this law excludes eligible institutions from offering federal financial aid under certain conditions, such as: if more than half of the institutions students are from distance learning programs or if the institution itself offers more classes for distance learning than it does on campus. This law can only be rectified by Congress.

Another law concerning online education is the 12 Hour Rule, which aims to ward off diploma mills or fraudulent online degree programs. Diploma mills tend offer distance learning or correspondence programs that do not meet government standards but seek to attain funding from the government. This law declares that all online education programs for non-traditional students must provide at least 12 hours of regularly scheduled instructions and exams for students to be able to qualify for federal financial aid. Currently this law has been deemed the Internet Equity & Education Act of 2001.