"It Won't Be Long Before It's Crying Time"

Whew, just finished writing my Crim Pro exam--with my IPod, which somehow always seems to pick the right tune for the moment, playing Ray Charles' great "Crying Time" ("I can tell by the way you hold me, darling, that it won't be long before it's crying time."). I've always found exam-writing to be a tedious chore (hence my resort to the 'pod to help me get through it)--somewhere between grading exams (#1) and sitting through faculty meetings (#3) on the very short list of things that I don't love about my job. Over the years, I have tried a variety of different approaches in an effort to increase fairness to students and/or decrease my own transaction costs, but don't think that I have by any means reached the perfect solution.

When I first started teaching, I used the classic issue-spotter essay exam, but found grading inordinately difficult. Many students seem to forget everything they know about good writing in the pressure of a timed exam, leaving me to sort through an unstructured stream-of-consciousness ramble, constantly flipping back and forth through the bluebook in search of the discussion of particular issues. I also never came up with a satisfactory way of handling the answers that were premised on some fundamental misconceptualization of the problem, but that otherwise were pretty good--the right answer to the wrong question. Should the student who makes one mistake in the crucial first step of the analysis get a better or worse grade than the student who makes many mistakes in later steps of the analysis?

I've also experimented with multiple-choice, but felt that somehow seemed to trivialize the students' efforts and imply a degree of determinacy in the law that I don't think is there. Also, I found it quite difficult to come up with plausible-sounding wrong answers, and, when I did, then felt guilty about trying to trick unsuspecting students.

In recent years, I have used a two-part exam. The first part is a classic issue-spotter, but administered as a take-home exam. The quality of the writing is much better when students are not laboring under a strict time limit, and I find grading to be much easier as a result. The second part is a timed, short-answer exam. The questions are answered with a word, a phrase, or at most a sentence or two. It strikes me as fairer to give students a couple of distinct exercises in which to demonstrate their mastery of the material, rather than making the whole grade hinge on one exercise, especially one that places a premium on speedy, written regurgitation skills that may or may not have much to do with what lawyers really do in practice. But please don't take me as evangelizing for my particular approach--I like it better than other approaches I have used, but am very much still open to other ideas.