A Proposed Alternative to Law School Exams
posted by Nate Oman
Spring is here and with it comes the bane of academic life: grading exams. Finishing up my first year in academia, I can confidently say that grading exams is the only part of the job that I positively despise. Even faculty meetings have their entertainment value. Indeed, over the last couple of days I have thought repeatedly that grading exams is much like document review, although not quite as fun. After all, even priv review holds out the possibility (however remote) of discovering some new and interesting fact. Exams, however, leave you with the same fact pattern page after page after page. Given how little both students and professors enjoy law school exams, I wonder if it might make more sense to simply got to an auction system for grades.
Law students, it seems to me, are interested in good grades for two reasons. First, they are neurotic, driven to always get “the Best” (best school, best grades, best clerkship, best firm, etc.). The neurosis frequently leads to awesome feats of discipline and can be quite productive, but it is also deeply unhealthy and self-destructive at some level. (As one who suffers bouts of this neurosis, I can testify to the truth of this). The second reason law students care about grades is because they are signals to future employers. If professors were to auction off grades, I suspect that the neurosis underplaying the first reason would remain, but would the second purpose be undermined?
Clearly, an auction in the absence of a curve would destroy virtually any signaling power that grades might possess (Cf. Yale Law School and Lake Wobegone), but what if we kept the curve and proceeded with the auction. What do grades actually signal to employers? One answer is intelligence, but there are other equally useful (or useless) signals of intelligence, such as LSAT scores. Another possible answer is that they signal self-discipline. It is hard to get good grades, and the attributes that make for a high GPA also make for a productive employee. I am sympathetic to this notion, but I wonder if an auction might signal many of the same attributes. After all, an auction ought to signal who places the greatest value on the signal. Such subjective valuation is not such a bad indicator of personal drive and commitment. It is, of course, far from perfect, but then so are law school exams. A law firm might think that straight As signals high-value employee, while it may simply signal neurosis.
Of course, one might object to the auction model by arguing that it favors the wealthy students. There is some truth to this, but generally speaking law students have access to fairly cheap credit, so this is not as great of a problem as one might think. Those who are driven but poor can simply borrow money to bid against their slacker but wealthy classmates.
The real value of the auction system, however, is that it could transform the stack of exams on my desk from hours of discomfort into cold, hard cash. Who can be against that?
May 12, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (20)
Grading oral argument is fun - May 12, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Instead of grading exams, there should simply be a moot court competition at the end of each class that draws on its content. Briefs can be written in groups of up to three but the number of oralists is limited to two per team. The point is to give the students a dynamic, rather than a doctrinal, understanding of the law. In addition, the grading occurs right after the argument and is submitted on that day. The tabulation of highest score, etc., can be left to the registrar’s office.
Revision - May 12, 2007 at 7:28 pm
It need not be moot court; it could be mock trials or mock negotiations also. But the point is that the exam should test practical and realtime application. Not writing skills.
Fitzhugh - May 12, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I imagine the admissions office thinks the same thing.
Jason - May 12, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Auctions sound great, but with two additional qualifications:
(1) proceeds have to go to charity;
(2) publication standards for tenure are doubled
Maybe that second condition should come with its own condition:
(3) auction will also decide who gets published in which law journals
WM 1L - May 12, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Thank you for not using the stair method.
Signed,
Your Contracts Class
Anon - May 12, 2007 at 10:04 pm
One of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.
Howard Wasserman - May 12, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Grading is Fun:
I do that as a part (about 15 % of final grade) in my small upper-level courses. Every student argues one case and sits on a panel to judge one case; the entire class is present to observe and discuss each argument. I have done it twice so far and have been very impressed with how seriously students take the exercise and how much most seem to enjoy it. And I enjoy grading this a lot more than 25 issue-spotting essays.
Mark McKenna - May 12, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Revision: “But the point is that the exam should test practical and realtime application. Not writing skills.”
What in the world do you think lawyers do in the real world, if writing skills don’t count as “practical” or “realtime application”?
James Grimmelmann - May 13, 2007 at 1:16 am
Access to cheap credit is a bit of a red herring. If grades are auctioned, and students’ career prospects are in substantial part determined by grades, students will borrow to bid for higher grades until any expected surplus from a lifetime in the legal profession is exhausted by the increased debt. But query whether students are already exhausting the expected surplus through expenditures on some other aspect of their education or preparation. If so, then a pure auction would leave law students largely unaffected on the whole, while diverting money from elsewhere in the system. If the proceeds go to charity, that would presumably be a net gain, in distributional terms.
Nate Oman - May 13, 2007 at 7:22 am
James: I would point out that if the proceeds went to me there would also be a distributional gain. As for career prospects, I suspect that they are influenced by grades at the outset but hardly determined by them.
James Grimmelmann - May 13, 2007 at 8:57 am
Good point. Being able to put “student of Nate Oman” on one’s resume, is, of course, the decisive factor. Grades are only a second-order factor for breaking ties.
Roger - May 13, 2007 at 12:25 pm
An antitrust prof at my law school had an interesting approach. He had an open offer to his classes: he would give them a grade distribution (how many of each grade were available) and have each person submit a sealed proposed grade. If the grades submitted corresponded to the distribution he would give people those grades instead of giving an exam. Apparently it never worked — the collective action problem was just too hard to overcome, even though the distribution offered was more generous than the exam distribution.
Mark McKenna and reading skills - May 13, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Mark McKenna,
If you look at a number of law exam test-taking tip guides, they harp on things like whether your handwriting is legible, whether the presentation is organized, and whether you skip every other line. The point is to make the written text, regardless of its content, easier to skim for the professor.
I am a practicing lawyer and having to skip every line in a bluebook, having legible handwriting, and organizing exam answers (in the sense of not making a revision of your answer on page 3 with an addendum on the back on page 7), has not helped me one whit.
But thanks for misinterpreting “writing skills” to mean “literary value” or “drafting ability” rather than “the skill of composing meaningful letters or characters that constitute readable matter.” Emphasis here on readable.
It only proves that someone reading too quickly and without depth can underestimate the depth of content of what he is reading. Which does not happen when one can ask a question an oral argument. Which is precisely why I and Howard Wasserman seem to think other testing methods are better.
Bruce Boyden - May 13, 2007 at 10:05 pm
5:24, I read “writing skills” the same way Mark did; it’s *at best* ambiguous. (I take it “penmanship” is what you had in mind.) In any event, nearly all students these days type out their answers on computers, so “writing skills” in your sense are no longer relevant (thankfully).
Mark McKenna - May 13, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Reading skills – If by “writing skills” you meant penmanship, then Bruce is right – it has very little to do with current law school exams. But in any event, following annoying rules like “skip every other line” or “write in black ink” is actually quite a bit like practice, at least if you do litigation and have to follow all of the local rules regarding typeface, font, binding, etc.
M Mills - May 14, 2007 at 12:29 am
Prof. Oman,
I think Prof. Grimmelmann is on to something here, which leads to a result you may like. Theoretically the prices set by the auction should be the present value of the expected income stream from the “biglaw” jobs, assuming a sufficiently competitive market, which is unlikely, given the barrier to entry. Of course, this would lead the firms to compete on other factors: dental plans and airplane rides to exotic boardrooms. To the extent that students have somewhat homogenous preferences, these intangible factors would be priced into the auction as well, making students entirely indifferent between the A and the C (thus reducing your workload further). Any heterogeneous preferences would sort themselves out, leaving students on the whole happier with their careers (and some of that would be captured by the law school years later when they endow a new professorship). Relaxing some of the assumptions, such as that of perfect information, would lead to students overpaying for the A, perhaps reducing morale that much more.
I’d like to add, on a personal note, that we aren’t indifferent yet…
Bruce and Mark are paradigmatic lazybones - May 14, 2007 at 12:36 am
You say it is ambiguous, I say you are ignoring context. I also say that pretending “rules” of exam-taking that “exist” only because professors are lazy and cursory in their grading methods are akin to local rules is just silly. Local rules are akin to the instructions at the top of the exam. Nowhere on a bluebook does it say “write legibly” (which varies from prof to prof, anyhow, as some are better at deciphering than others); nowhere on an exam does it say “skip every other line in the bluebook”.
Both Mark McKenna and Bruce Boyden are cases in point for why we should have different methods of testing law students. They decide something is ambiguous and downgrade it, when if they simply paid more attention and were less self-absorbed and self-interested in justifying their laziness they’d understand what they were actually reading. But no, they’re too interested in writing an article on Feminist Virtue Ethics in Minnesotan Corporate Law (circa 1954-67) to bother.
I would also note that if you look up the definition of “writing” it does not permit Bruce’s and Mark’s interpretation. So I wonder where you’re getting your definition from, because it certainly isn’t the dictionary, and certainly not a legal one.
Scott Moss - May 14, 2007 at 9:15 am
The proceeds should go to Nate, because then W&M could massively lower his base salary; Nate would be like a salesman or Wall Streeter whose main compensation is commission- or bonus-based.
With prof salaries down, tuition could be lowered. Suddenly students (1) might find auctions appealing, and (2) would have more money to bid in the auctions!
I think one of the for-profit law schools should try this first. It might have to “share” a cut of the auction proceeds with the ABA accreditation cmte, or course.
Mark McKenna - May 14, 2007 at 11:35 am
12:36 – you obviously are bitter about the way you were graded in law school, but you don’t know anything at all about how either Bruce or I grade or the amount of time we put into it. To take just the most obvious example, you say that “nowhere on a bluebook does it say “write legibly” (which varies from prof to prof, anyhow, as some are better at deciphering than others); nowhere on an exam does it say “skip every other line in the bluebook”. Actually, my exam instructions say both of those things quite explicitly, and for basically the same reasons local rules require fonts of certain sizes.
Disinterested Realist - May 14, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Actually, my exam instructions say both of those things quite explicitly, and for basically the same reasons local rules require fonts of certain sizes.
Then it boggles the mind why you misinterpreted what “writing skills” meant. Perhaps your intrepretive skills are set on “result-oriented” and you see ambiguity (or bitterness) where it serves your interests. I believe Brian Tamahana has examined this.
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