Teaching, and Grading, Colloquium Courses
posted by Dave Hoffman
The Religious Colloquium of Marburg Bears Almost No Relation to Academic Colloquia Today
In the Spring of 2010, Peter Huang and I will be co-teaching a colloquium on Law and Human Behavior for the second time. The course invites outside speakers to present their work to an audience consisting of upper-year law students. (Faculty are invited to attend as well.) Students are graded on response papers that they write about the presenters’ works. We hope they get good value from this kind of course, primarily: repeated writing opportunities with lots of feedback; exposure to a wide variety of current scholarship; and learning from the presentation styles of different speakers. Teachers get return too –though the constant grading load makes the course at least as much work as an ordinary seminar, and probably more.
As Peter and I begin to think about the Spring’s colloquium, I wonder whether any of you have experiences with this kind of course, and if so, how you answered the following questions:
(1) Do you have “off-weeks” where you introduce the readings to come, or do you schedule a speaker every week? The last time we taught the course, we had four weeks without speakers which we used to preview the coming papers. I’m not convinced these were particularly useful.
(2) Do you require the students to write a response to every speaker? The last time we taught the course, students wrote responses for around three-fourths of the speakers. An advantage to this approach is that it allows the students to pass if they really feel out of their element on a particularly paper.
(3) Do you require (or strongly) suggest prerequisites for the course? We haven’t done so, though it became clear in the course that students with undergraduate backgrounds in statistics, economics and psychology were getting more out of the presentations. This is obviously more of a problem in law-and courses than in, say, a colloquium course on constitutional theory.
(4) Do students hand in their responses before, or after, the speaker’s presentation? Our approach was before, but students reported they would have preferred after.
(5) Do you give all of the student responses to the speaker, or do you screen? Our approach was inclusive, though this probably was a mistake.
(6) How did you deal with grading? One issue here is that mastery grading (of the kind that is appealing in a writing course) means that you ought to start grading very “low” to give yourself room to increase grades over time. Another is that you have to be careful not to overly reward students who (as described above) have a substantive leg up because of their college majors. An added word of warning: it’s my experience that students are much more likely to dispute their grades (or at least argue about them) in a writing seminar than in a large exam course, although the overall mean in seminars is much, much higher.
August 6, 2009 at 5:06 am
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (6)
Darian Ibrahim - August 6, 2009 at 6:02 am
Dave — I’m teaching a course like this for the first time in the fall. Mine’s on corporate governance. Leandra Lederman at Indiana taught a tax colloquium and was kind enough to share her experiences with me. Based on her terrific advice, the amount of funding I was able to secure, etc., I’ve put together a draft syllabus that I’m happy to send you (although at this point you’ve taught a colloquium class one more time than I have). But the short answers to your questions are as follows:
1) I do have off weeks, in large part to keep costs down, but now I’m concerned that you didn’t find the preparatory sessions useful;
2) Yes, students must write a short reaction paper for every speaker;
3) I require bus orgs II (public corporations) as a prerequisite so that the exchanges with visiting faculty can proceed on a high level — I don’t want someone in the class who doesn’t understand the basics of fiduciary duties, insider trading, etc.;
4) Reaction papers are due before the speaker’s visit to make them really dig in; I fear that after the visit they’ll just be parroting back the good ideas from the talk/q&a. They have the option, if really off the mark the first time, to rewrite one of the papers after, and to make a law review-like edit of one paper in lieu of the typical reaction paper;
5) I plan to screen the papers and only give speakers those that I think will be helpful;
6) Grade based on 60% reaction papers (10% per paper) and 40% for class participation — a high percentage, but I really want to provoke meaningful exchanges in the classroom. But I agree with you that grading is difficult in seminars. One particular concern: Do I hand back graded reaction papers as we go, so students know where they stand, or only give informal feedback along the way? The former takes some of the surprise out of the grade and allows us to address any problems early, but could also affect the class dynamic for those who aren’t doing well. I think a higher grading curve is appropriate in a course like this than the large exam course, but at least someone has to get a B-/C+…
Maryland Conservatarian - August 6, 2009 at 6:59 am
“Another is that you have to be careful not to overly reward students who (as described above) have a substantive leg up because of their college majors.”
Why do you use the word “reward”? If one student displays an obvious mastery of a subject as compared to another, who cares why that is when it comes to doling out grades. Are you grading results or effort?
ParatrooperJJ - August 7, 2009 at 4:37 am
How can a student write a “response” paper if they have to turn it in before they hear the presentation?? I seem to be missing something?
TRE - August 7, 2009 at 8:53 am
More evidence that law school grading depends highly on arbitrariness and capriciousness.
Dave Hoffman - August 7, 2009 at 10:21 am
Paratrooper: Because the outside speakers give us working papers which we circulate to the students in advance of the class. The responses are to the papers.
TRE: I don’t understand you comment. We make our grading scheme clear to the students. If you mean to say that grading someone’s written work is inherently subjective, I think you are wrong, but if you were right the problem wouldn’t be specific to law school.
MC: I think you hit on the problem. There ought to be different approaches for different classes. This particular class isn’t about rewarding students for knowing more statistics, but for their ability to intelligently respond to (think about) authors’ work and provide creative and useful feedback. Although to a degree “rewarding” students who know more about the background literature is unavoidable, I think that a mastery grading system for a writing seminar ought to reward improvement during the class to the greatest extent possible.
TRE - August 7, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Dave: Since you only address grading in #6 I think it is pretty clear what I’m talking about. If it is a special manifestation of a general truth, I’m fine with that. When you say you make your grading scheme clear to students, do you actually communicate your intention to start grading low, in order to increase grades over time and how you intend to balance grading between people of different majors? I think that the correct way to achieve the balance is to make sure the class has enough novel information to give anyone a fair chance.
My interpretation of leaving room to increase the grades over time is that you might give a paper that would be an A in the last week a lower grade in the first week. If this is true you will be using the grading to manipulate the students instead of giving feedback on the quality of their work, which I find A&C.
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