“I was always sitting in the back row, and she was always sitting in the front row,” recalled Mark W. Stewart, who is now a Toronto-based attorney. “She was keen and sincere and not much different than she is now,” he added. “She was very prepared in class.”…

“She was a very good student and was considered really intelligent,” Gradel, a longtime Republican Party activist, said of the Minnesota congresswoman. “She had a reputation for just being sharp,” he said, adding, “You have to have pretty good grades to be admitted to William & Mary from a place like Oral Roberts, which was a very new law school at the time.”…

According to Londoff, Bachmann exuded such traits in law school, whether she was getting grilled in class by her professors or when addressing her classmates. As he put it, most of the other students cowered under pressure, but she didn’t.

“Here’s what impressed me,” he said. “She would give these presentations in a way that made it seem like she was never nervous.”