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Thursday, April 16, 2009
Not Testing Material From the Last Week of Class or: Do We Need to Make the Reading Period Longer?
Learning theory suggests that reflection on the subject matter-and better yet, periodic assessment combined with reflection-provides essential feedback for the learning process....Typically, however, law students ignore thinking throughout the term, substituting instead a last minute cramming process in the last week of the term. Apparently, law professors did this as students, and hence encourage their students to do the same. [FN82]
[FN82] Evidently this represents the standard view of law professors:
Many law professors believe students learn more during the final week of "cramming" before a final examination than they do in the whole preceding semester. They see the value of final examinations as being an inducement to students to engage in review, in the process of "putting it all together."
Nickles, supra note 4, at 462 n.165. My own law school professors frequently commented, "don't worry if you don't understand it all now, I didn't understand this stuff until the last week of class either."
Posted by Evidence ProfBlogger on April 16, 2009 at 09:48 AM in Teaching Law | Permalink
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Comments
Thanks, Colin, for sharing your helpful techniques and the highlights of those who have written in the area of law teaching and evaluation. Learning in the sink or swim days, and flourishing (with the attendent ego-trip), becoming a better teacher in a non-elite law school with "millenial" students has been a learning and adjustment process. Every semester I become more convinced of the "training model" and further reject the "judging model" used on my law school class. Great job on your innovative techniques (e.g., the daily review hypo) and incorporation of published learning theory.
mj
Posted by: mj | Apr 17, 2009 12:18:32 AM
Thanks, C.E. Petit. I have been doing some research for a future post about the possibility of doing a law school oral (argument) exam and came across this from Ron M. Aizen, Note, Four Ways to Better 1L Assessments, 54 Duke L.J. 765, 767-69 (2004):
Today, first-year law students typically receive course grades based entirely, or almost entirely, on single end-of-course essay exams. Using a single exam to measure law student performance contrasts markedly with earlier practices at American law schools. From the early-to mid-nineteenth century, students were generally assessed far more frequently than they are today. For example, at the Litchfield Law School, the first professional American law school, students took weekly oral exams. Harvard examined students orally or in writing both weekly and “at the end of each text or topic.” Michigan hired recent graduates and young lawyers to oversee daily oral and written examinations. Cornell, Penn, and Columbia combined frequent, often daily, quizzes with more cumulative assessments, such as end-of-term, annual, and graduation exams.
In the late 1800s, however, law schools began to use final exams as the sole measure of student performance. At Harvard in the early 1870s, students were for the first time required to pass annual exams to receive their law degrees. This innovation was introduced by Dean Christopher Langdell, who also popularized the case study method. The case method and the sole final exam allowed law professors to teach and evaluate large classes of students--and high student-faculty ratios were financially advantageous. Dean Langdell's economical model was eagerly embraced by other American universities. By the end of the nineteenth century, the use of single exams to assess student performance had become widespread among American law schools.
Posted by: Colin Miller | Apr 16, 2009 2:09:53 PM
Perhaps this is as much an indictment of the so-called Socratic "case method" as it is of exam practices. If law is about learning to "think like a lawyer" and "learn the language of the law in all its majesty," maybe law instruction should take some hints from foreign-language instruction... such as that one introduces the big picture through lecture and integrative/synthetic readings, avoids graded confrontation (or quasigraded confrontation such as "participation") until after students have had an opportunity for meaningful feedback, and provides immediate, meaningful feedback at all stages of the learning process. But far be it from me to suggest that, in this age of codification and rules, Restatements, and administrative rulemakings, legal instruction -- particularly in the first year -- focusses too much on judicial glosses too often ghostwritten/researched by law clerks.
In short, I think the problem is less with the exam than what leads up to it.
Posted by: C.E. Petit | Apr 16, 2009 11:17:51 AM
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