I don't miss law school exams.
Eugene Volokh has a post about why law schools generally base grades on one end-of-semester exam. His post links to a few other comment-filled threads all about law school exams, and it's all relatively interesting. Volokh says that there's one exam because professors have to grade their own exams and don't like grading, but also because in the zero-sum world where the grade distribution is going to be the same regardless of how many exams, in the end students would rather only have to study for one exam than have to study for more than one.
It wasn't the one exam vs. multiple exams that I found unenjoyable about law school exams. What I found unenjoyable about law school exams was that, for the most part, they didn't play to my strengths. I think there's probably a case to be made that a lot of testing that goes on in elementary school and high school rewards speed and cleverness over a deeper understanding of what's going on. I did really well in high school math and science classes where the exams basically required memorizing some stuff, decoding which of the stuff you memorized was applicable to each question on the exam, figuring out how to apply it, and repeating, with some amount of time pressure, for a number of questions. But I don't think my genuine understanding of the material came close to matching my ability to do well on the exams.
I found that law school exams, for the most part, were striving for something else. Now, some of them thought they were striving for something else, but if you spit some stuff back and faked the big picture, you could grab a lot of the points and still do okay. But the long ones -- the eight-hour take-home exams, or the week-long take-home papers -- wanted comprehension and thought, not just memorization and application. And the lack of time pressure almost made me angry sometimes. I wanted the eight-hour exam to take eight hours, because I knew that if it took eight hours, some people wouldn't finish, and my surface-level understanding of the material would look better in comparison.
To some degree I'm selling myself short in this post. I did fine in law school, and I understood the material in most of my classes. But I expect that lots of my classmates -- at least the ones that were trying -- understood the material better than I did, and the ones who did better on some of the exams probably felt pretty pleased that at least not everything was based on speed and cleverness but that actually real comprehension and thought was valued.
I'm rambling without a real point here -- I don't know whether I think law school exams test the right thing, or certainly whether they're graded well or whether there should be one a semester or twelve. I just know I don't particularly miss them.
I just came back from a grueling civ pro exam. It is what it is .
Posted by: | May 08, 2006 at 07:10 PM
Law school exams are just bizarre in the context of education in general.
Bad public schools, a mediocre undergrad, and the modern fetish for standardized testing turned me into a multiple choice test taking machine. My greatest moment of triumph: the LSAT.
Then the rug gets pulled out from under me and all tests become subjective essays. Should I have adapted? Of course. Was it easy to after 20-some years of mindlessly picking between 4 to 5 options when presented with a one sentence problem? No.
Posted by: Russ | May 08, 2006 at 08:30 PM
My *favorite* exam question (In the context of a con law exam):
"Write a concurring or dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Raich."
That's it. That was the entire question. The rest of the exam was similarly hopeless.
Posted by: | May 08, 2006 at 10:30 PM
Am I crazy to say that your exam question sounds like a lot of fun?
Posted by: one el | May 09, 2006 at 02:38 AM
one el,
Yes. Yes you are.
Posted by: two L | May 09, 2006 at 10:10 AM
Actually, I think you are absolutely right about the 3-hour (Just took one today) versus 8-hour (Just took one Monday and another on Friday) versus week-long take home papers. Couldn't agree more.
Posted by: Popp | May 10, 2006 at 05:08 PM
I think asking students to write a concurring or dissenting opinion for a current-term case isn't a bad way to pull the information one would expect the students to know. No exam ever covers everything, but a case that covers a sufficiently complicated issue (like federalism) will get some of the important chunks.
As for the "professors have to grade the exams" bit, there's always TAs... personally I liked my civ pro class for having intermediate exams just so I'd know whether or not I had a clue, but that may have been a particular virtue for a 1L first semester class.
Posted by: PG | May 12, 2006 at 09:39 PM
I was surprised that as an aspiring writer, you did not point out the fact that law school exams, and legal education generally, fails to recognize and perhaps even penalizes good writing. If you take the time to worry about word choice, sentence structure and paragraph organization (or even proper English), while the rest of the class is going at it with their laptops, spitting out everything they know in a stream of consciouness, you are sure to lose points. It's no wonder judges and their clerks are appalled at the state of briefs that are turned in to the courts. Volokh's reasoning revealed the laziness of law professors. Grading exams is one of the things they are paid to do. I've had so many law school exams that betrayed extreme laziness on the part of their authors. For example, one essay question stated that it was replicated from spam received by the professor. My response was, "If you aren't going to write a test, why do you expect us to write an answer?"
Posted by: | June 06, 2006 at 06:02 PM