Do law students know (or believe) that we lawprofs mean for the exam to be a rewarding educational experience?
UPDATE: In the comments, lots of students and former students express the disbelief I expected, though there are concessions that an occasional exam seemed to fit my description. Sneaking Suspicions gives his perspective here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jonathan Adler has picked up my question, so the conversation continues in the comments over on Volokh Conspiracy. And Rick Garnett has done the same at Prawfsblawg. I wonder how many of these commenters are students who should be studying for their exams. Many of them sound rather grumpy about the whole notion of finding the intrinsic value in exam-taking. No, no, it's torture. Just leave me alone with my vision of law school as torture. Well, would it help if I told you that if you could find the place in your head where exam-taking is a rewarding experience, you'd get a better grade?
May 5, 2006
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45 comments:
I'm not a law student, but I'd hope that we'd have all the educational experiences prior to the exam.
The exam isn't supposed to be an educational experience, it's supposed to test how well you processed and remember the educational experiences it covers.
Michael:
"For example, I have yet to find any five hour test a rewarding experience."
Just wait until you take the bar exam.
Define "rewarding".
Uh oh.
There's your problem. You've got an audience who has one thing on their minds $$$$$$$$.
You don't want to hear that.
If you want students to lie to you---if you need to hear that they are there ONLY for personal enrichment, interpersonal growth Hahahahahah----sure they'll tell you that, if they think it will curry favor and get them a better grade.
We all know there's only one reason why anybody would bother with law school, or med school, or MBA.....
Prof: Why are you here???
Student: Duh.
-----would that students were allowed to be honest....
It's not about education, it's about standardization, which = $$$$$$ and security.
Peace, Maxine
Required Reading: "The Closing of American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students"----by Allan Bloom
He's a Republican, or was. He was an economist, a consultant to both the Reagan and Bush (Senior) administrations.
You must read that book. And, he's got a chapter in there on Graduate and professional schools. Says they are completely unnecessary. He says that what law schools claim to be the Socratic method.....is not Socratic at all!
I'm just the messenger, this is all Allan Bloom.
And he was right as more and more of the public embraces distance learning and apprenticeships. Sitting in the classoom is going the way of the phonograph, or the 8-track.
I'm sorry, Ann. I really am. You're a survivor. By that time, you'll have expanded this blog and makin' turning a profit, in spite of yourself!
Peace, Maxine
Are law exams supposed to be more rewarding an educational experience than exams of any other type?
Please, Ann, just tell me that you don't come in class on exam day gleefully rubbing your hands (I'm pretty sure you don't wear academic robes), chuckling and asking, "Reaaaadddyyy, sports fans????" and then adding something like, "It's time to reward the good and punish the wicked."
I had a history prof like that.
It's not about education, it's about standardization, which = $$$$$$ and security.
Pish-posh. I went to law school because when I was born, the family's old sooth-sayer did her thing, and determined that my fate was to become a lawyer.
I am not joking.
Truly: ---I'll tell ya how it's done. It's not conformity. You don't hold up a mirror, you make inferences. 1. Write the word "inference" in all caps, followed by colon.
2. And then, write an entirely new story, keeping it in the form of an IRAC (Wow, where'd I learn that?) Remember what Ann was saying: Law Profs are fine arts majors, they aren't Poli Sci majors any more....which means you get points for creativity and artistry.
Also, not 40 pages, 10-20, but even that's excessive. Edit. Prune the deadwood.
---A complete waste of time. All of this could be taught on-the-job at the firms themselves. And no tuition needed.....they pay you. Doesn't that sound like a better bargain?
Mark my words: Today's generation of homeschoolers, and cost-conscious parents are not going to take much more of this drudgery.
Peace, Maxine
It's a bad deal all around.
1. Law school has nothing to do with passing the Bar, you still have to take the special Bar Prep, and even then....who knows?
2. You won't get into any of the blue-chip firms unless you are top-ten or better. Nowadays, I think it's top-5 or better.
Bad bargain. At least with the MBA, you can salvage something, and do a little bit more with it.
I always hope the "a-ha" moment occurs at some point before the exam.
It is nice, though, to see an exam that really goes to the heart of the class topic.
Re: Maxine:
It's a bad deal all around.
I pretty much agree, if your objective is money and you only go to a mid-ranked school. As it is, though, it's a hoop the ABA and most state bars make you jump through.
1. Law school has nothing to do with passing the Bar, you still have to take the special Bar Prep, and even then....who knows?
I concur.
2. You won't get into any of the blue-chip firms unless you are top-ten or better. Nowadays, I think it's top-5 or better.
I do not concur. Or maybe I do, depending on what you mean by "blue-chip firm." If you just mean one of the megafirms, with the six figure starting salaries, I do not concur -- I know people who got into big firms from schools in the top-20, some probably even lower, rather than even the top-10. On the other hand, my sense is that for people below the top-10, recruitment is much more concentrated on regional offices, and a top-5 degree carries across geographic zones far, far better (i.e. you can study in NYC and get a job in LA, or study at Stanford and get a job in Boston, etc.)
Bad bargain.
Depends where you go and what you want to do with it. If you are burdened by college debt and get into Harvard, say, you can probably pay back your debts on a better time-frame coming out of law school than you could on your average liberal arts graduate salary. You come out ahead -- good deal, I say. On the other hand, your prospects are constricted with a mid-rank school, and your debt is probably just a bad. State schools can correct for this somewhat though -- I recall that Berkeley would have been much cheaper than where I ultimately went, only there had recently been a lot of news about the bigotry and Judenhass in that part of the country, and I opted for elsewhere.
Maxine - actually, in Wisconsin, it does. If you want to practice in Wisconsin and you fulfill certain requirements, you can gain admission to the state bar via the diploma privilege.
Balfegor, I think Maxine was referencing the top 5 or 10 percent of the class. A top 5 percenter at a mid-level law school should be able to easily out earn a 50 percenter from Harvard.
What about Yale (cf. Seven Machos)? No class ranks there.
Wisconson is different. Maybe things are different in Chicago and Wisconson----the Midwest.
It's a nightmare in California.
Climate is good, though. C'mon down.
Peace, Maxine
Balfegor, I think Maxine was referencing the top 5 or 10 percent of the class. A top 5 percenter at a mid-level law school should be able to easily out earn a 50 percenter from Harvard.
Now that I think about it, probably the reason I didn't leap to this class-rank interpretation, but was certain it was about law-school rank, is simply that at top schools, much more than 50% end up going on to the megafirms (or have the option, and pass it up for government work or the like). I don't have much basis, other than personal experience and anecdote to work on, but I'd guess 70% or more of my class (in a top-5 school) went down that path.
A lot of them plan to change jobs after two or three years, others after five or so. A lot of them go in expecting to do precisely that -- some of it may be that they are unused to working hard, as Machos says, but a lot of it is simply that they never intended to stay in it for the long haul. They want to pay off a significant chunk of their student debt, make a few connections, get the kind of training opportunities you can get at a big firm, and then use all that to move onto a smaller "lifestyle" firm, or possibly move out of the field entirely.
If you're coming out at the top of a higher-level mid-tier school, like the top 20 or 30, I think you probably compete with the topmost schools' graduates on a comparable, if still inequal basis. But as you move down the hierarchy, my sense is that you need to do a lot more to get noticed. You don't get the automatic on-campus interview working for you, you're less likely to have people at the school who can work to get you in, and you're less likely to have loyal alumni of your school sitting on the hiring committee.
But back to law school exams! I have had the ah-hah moment come in the middle of an exam. I have also had it come after the exam. Alas.
We ARE talking about exams. In Ann's original post she uses the word "rewarding". Freudian slip?
I take that to mean reward on the investment of time and money---lotsa money put forth.
The educational experience itself, of the exam, wouldn't seem to yield the kinds of rewards that students are looking for namely, $$$$$$ and job security....given the tearing of hair out and worries about rank/tier.
In fact, in California, law students, I've observed are a might resentful...going by the suicide rate pre-exam, among other factors.
Peace, Maxine
Hey Ann:
If you knew you had emotionally unstable students on hand, and there'd been lots of suicides lately.....would you consider making things easier for your students?
Any way for your students to guilt you into letting 'em slide?
Guilt has its uses.
Peace, Maxine
As a lawyer and son of a law professor, Ann, I say: "Yeah, right..."
Actually, my dad always tried to make his exams at least interesting. I can plot the track of my and my siblings' lives and interests by reading his old exams. When my sister watched the Muppet Movie incessantly, dad had questions involving Kermit and Miss Piggy and across-the-country journeys. When she watched Wizard of Oz, he asked contracts questions about the Wizard sending them out on a dangerous tasks and then reneging on his commitment. When he bought horses, there were horse questions, then came guitars, then scuba diving.
And apparently my young life provided ENDLESS examples (which, I'm told, he regularly uses in class) of real life contract issues.
Oh, yeah. Law exams are such rewarding experiences...
I'm not a law professor, but I just finished giving an exam. I don't have much time to grade it, so I put A LOT of time into making an exam that is thought provoking, test the ability to bring together a number of concepts, relies on factual recall only to illustrate those concepts, and is easy for me to grade. It was damn hard to make up-it took me several days or working and reworking questions, and anticipating the wacked-out possibilities for wrong answers to misunderstood questions. And I imposed sentence limits (in THREE sentences or fewer, explain...).
I don't know about the students, but I sure found making up that exam an educational and rewarding experience. Damn near killed me, though.
But grading is a breeze.
hey Joe, about your post:
"One funny anecdote from law school exams - we had a former Navy pilot in our class. Before one exam a fellow student asked him if he was nervous. His reply - "exams don't make me nervous. Landing on a carrier at night in a storm makes me nervous."
I believe this is known as "the right stuff."
That's a great example of why elite universities need to wake up and let ROTC back on campus! I'd love to have men and women like that guy in my classroom.
jeff "I'm not a law student, but I'd hope that we'd have all the educational experiences prior to the exam. The exam isn't supposed to be an educational experience, it's supposed to test how well you processed and remember the educational experiences it covers."
I could not disagree more. How could there ever be an end to learning about constitutional law? I've been studying the subject for more than a quarter of a century and still learning new things all the time. The first year law students after one semester are supposed to have it all down? Impossible! Absurd! The exam gives students a chance to process and practice the things they've begun to grasp. Writing about a problem is always a learning experience. If I write a law review article, it's a learning experience. What kind of an impoverished topic does not admit to more learning? Thank God it's not my lot in life to teach such a thing.
Is it true that most law profs want the exam to be rewarding?
My impression is that most of my professors this year have seen the exam as a necessary evil. Judging from what they've told us about how they grade, I agree with other posters that it seems like they try to come up with questions that will separate us into more easily discernable categories, but not necessarily the most thought-provoking questions.
To me, exams serve the purpose of making you review the entire semester and put all the pieces together. That's the studying part. Taking the exam isn't particularly rewarding because you rarely have enough time to think through your answers. I don't understand why class participation and preparation during the semester don't count for anything.
Maxine Weiss "If you knew you had emotionally unstable students on hand, and there'd been lots of suicides lately.....would you consider making things easier for your students? Any way for your students to guilt you into letting 'em slide?"
I don't get it. Our exams are curved. It's the too-easy exam that should worry the student. In any case, my questions aren't that hard on the surface, they just provide opportunities for students who have intellectually engaged with the subject.
I try to write a fair exam that resembles the class discussions. I want to find the students who seriously engaged with the discussions we had on a daily basis. The exam is one more chance to engage. The students who have cared about doing that are the ones I want to get the best grades. I try to write an exam that will make that happen.
Morningview: The easy answer is that we don't have TAs to do the grading.
My hope is that the exam is a rewarding experience. Grading, alas, is a necessary evil. But the exam itself should be rewarding.
In a perfect world, I could sit down with all the students in small groups and go over each question, discussing all the possibilities. It is not feasible. Nonetheless, I would hope that the student who prepares well has a real sense of seeing the course come together through the exam. That was my experience as a student, when I prepared well -- which may explain why I do (and enjoy doing) what I do.
Lawgrad: Thanks!
Most exams I've taken have been regurgitation exercises. A couple exams were joyful, synthesis experiences. It happened once in law school.
After law school, I attended JAG Corps Basic for 10 weeks. They had a much more straight-forward teaching style and the exams were, too. But I came out of JAG School feeling like I knew something.
Jump school was another learning style all together. Completing that "exam" [5th jump from an aircraft while in flight] was positively euphoric.
I had a fulfilling moment this semester on receiving a take-home midterm returned via email, with the message: "Wonderfully thought-provoking questions; I had trouble staying anywhere near the word-limits." I had spent quite some time trying to make a good exam that prompted students to work with the literature we'd read, and not focus on information, so this was a nice reward.
But now, this topic has made me all anxious. I went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival today when I should have been writing a final exam. Doh! Now my brain is all sunfried and beer-fuzzy. The exam will wait until tomorrow.
Richard Fagin: You're assuming I write fact pattern exams, but (except in Civpro2) I don't.
"There's your problem. You've got an audience who has one thing on their minds $$$$$$$$."
I think that would be very said if it is accurate. Understandable, to be sure; law school isn't cheap, and anyone who doesn't have access to unlimited money who hasn't given serious thought before undertaking it as to recoup the money is, frankly, too stupid to be admitted.
I have to admit that I've been giving very serious thought to the idea of going back to law school, but the reason I'd go is not to make money, but because the older I get, and the more judicial opinions and the more legal scholarship I read, the more I think that there are seriously problems which require people committed to formalism to be teaching law, and since to teach requires a J.D., that means school. You might not ever get rich, in public service, but let me tell you, it's better than digging a ditch.
One of my law professors once commented that students are the only consumers in the world who want LESS for their money. Obviously, we had asked if we HAD to know that for the exam one too many times...
John Jenkins said..."The end of learning about constitutional law occurs at approximately the same time you figure out that they are making things up that suit their preferences and then cloaking it in doctrine."
How is that the end for someone who wants to understand what is happening and to function in arguing to judges? That's like saying learning about psychology ends at the point when you realize that human beings do not reveal everything they think and feel. You've stated a jejune insight that is merely at point at which one realizes how difficult the study of the topic is going to be. If you bail out because it's too complex for you, it surely doesn't mean there's nothing left to learn.
Most of the exams I took in law school are best forgotten forever, but I did take one that was a genuine learning experience. It was a "Remedies" exam, and I can recite the entire examination for you, word for word, right here:
Discuss the role of punishment in equity.
The entire class was aghast when we opened the exam. There were moans and hisses and catcalls all over the room. But answering that question made me think about every significant point we had covered in that class, relate them all to one another, and write about them as a complex but coherent single idea, rather than as a regurgitated outline. I know this unmasks me forever as an unreconstructed geek -- but it was fun.
Discuss the role of punishment in equity.
That has to be the best law exam ever. Haha. Re: Equity, though, that's something I really feel I don't understand as well as I would like. It's always just hovered around as a bunch of maxims about clean-hands and regarding as done things that ought to be done and whatnot, and the precise historical evolution remains obscure to me. Cramming on Remedies for the bar gave more data, but not much more context or understanding.
Equity and Agency -- those are two subjects I'd like to have studied in law school. Ah well.
"All criminal laws have been repealed and replaced by one statute: do good, avoid evil. Discuss."
I'd have stood up and asked if I was in the right building, because I signed up for a law class, not philosophy.
"Discuss the role of punishment in equity."
"All criminal laws have been repealed and replaced by one statute: do good, avoid evil. Discuss."
Wow. I never knew writing an exam could be so easy! Just a one-liner, eh? I've never seen a law school exam like that. Those look like college essay questions.
How's this for a rewarding law school exam question?
Pre-exam instructions: There will be a question on Romer v. Evans. Study this decision well, including the dissent. You may bring a copy of the decision to the exam.
Question: a) Re-state, in your own words, and as clearly and as objectively as you can, all of J. Scalia's counter-arguments to the majority's decision. b) Critically analyze J. Scalia's counter-arguments and draft your own argument establishing the conclusion that his objections are persuasive or are not persuasive.
Remember the bomb threats? Right when the exam is beginning to start...whoops.....it's a bomb threat.....evacuate the building!
I'm pretty sure those fake bomb threats were staged to weed out the cheaters, (not that you could cheat on a blue book, or could you?). I went to school in California, we had all sorts of weirded out things like that.
I've been told through the grapevine that the Administration would simply stage fake bomb threats to throw off the curve and add variety to the test-taking process ie.....you'd still have to write...but outside under a tree..
In other words: Could students perform under changing environmental pressures.
Performance under pressure----that was part of the test. Or, a fire alarm, or something like that....just to throw off the balance and see if it changes the results. Dumb.
Stupid. Yet, is IS all about performance.
Nothing like a good fire drill.
Peace, Maxine
An exam can be a rewarding experience in itself. That said, I'm likely to roll my eyes when a professor claims to have written such an exam. They're very rare, and I believe it only when I see it.
I translate "I want you to engage with this exam" into "I want you to discuss my pet theories in your answer." THis isn't too different from "only" testing doctrine, it's just a different form of regurgitation.
Maxine:
You are wrong in almost every assertion you made about Allan Bloom:
"He's a Republican, or was."
Actually he was a registered Democrat. He was a neoconservative, and were he alive today, probably would be a Republican, but was a registered Democrat nonetheless.
"He was an economist,"
No he wasn't. He was a professor of political philosophy.
"a consultant to both the Reagan and Bush (Senior) administrations."
Again, while many of his students may have worked in both administrations, and in the present Bush administration, Bloom had no official connection with either the Reagan or Bush administrations.
"And, he's got a chapter in there on Graduate and professional schools. Says they are completely unnecessary."
That's a big overstatement. Bloom realized the need for businessmen and attorneys, and hence did not think such graduate degrees were useless. Rather, he lamented how these degrees were elevated above the humanities studies. Yet, the humanities were in such a state of disarray because of their own intellectual decline. So it was the fault of the humanities that people were taking the MBAs and JDs more seriously.
Though Bloom did point out that if all you care about is training for a profession you don't need to spend 4 years for an undergraduate degree and then another few for a graduate degree. If all you care about is utility, it could be done in less time.
"He says that what law schools claim to be the Socratic method.....is not Socratic at all!"
I don't remember him talking about this; I could be wrong though.
Joe said...
"Simon, funny you should say that, the prof had a doctorate in philosophy."
I am not surprised. There's an old saying: if all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails. It wouldn't surprise me that if you have a philosophy degree, all your endeavours start to approach problems from the point of view of philosophy. His exam question is probably a perfectly good question for a philosophy paper, but I don't think it has much place in a law exam.
In defense of philosophy, a philosophical question is exactly the kind of question you are likely get in an argument before the US Supreme Court.
I'm a medical student who just finished taking my first set of boards. I did thousands of practice questions most of which I found interesting and educational, but I can't imagine any actual graded test being rewarding. When you actually take the test you have all the stress in the world, and you can't review it until weeks or months later if at all. I don't doubt that some professors try to make their exams rewarding, but why would anyone expect students to see things the same way? The students are coming from a completely differnt perspective that makes it impossible to see things the same way.
"Discuss the role of punishment in equity."
"All criminal laws have been repealed and replaced by one statute: do good, avoid evil. Discuss."
Wow. I never knew writing an exam could be so easy! Just a one-liner, eh?
I'd imagine it makes up for ease-of-creation on the grading end. At any rate, since a nontrivial proportion of law students are basically going to be regurgitating their entire class-outline anyhow, no matter what questions get asked, it seems reasonable to let them do that, and just make them perform their regurgitation according to some organising principle.
Jonathan: About Allan Bloom--- I'm reading "Ravelstein" right now, it's kind of a biography/memoir on Allan Bloom. He absolutely was an advisor to the Reagan/Bush administrations. Not in an official sense, but Cabinet Members, --his former students-- would call him up and give him briefs, early, before stuff reached the public.
He was into philosophy but he studied Keynes---who was a German economist.
Allan Bloom definitely had a negative view of higher education. The only higher education and graduate schools he approved of were those in the hard sciences and Engineering.
He was a really fascinating man, and had the ear of two Republican presidents. Didn't create policy, but was certainly consulted, even if unofficially.
Peace, Maxine
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