Guest: Kicking off guest stint

The following is by Kerri Stone, my FIU colleague anda guest prawf this month:

I am thrilled to be guest-blogging this month and honored to have been asked. I am an Associate Professor of Law at the Florida International University College of Law, where I teach Contracts, Employment Discrimination, Employment Law, Labor Law, and a seminar in Employment Discrimination Law. I write about antidiscrimination legislation and jurisprudence.

 

I thought I’d use this guest stint opportunity to generate some discussions about some topics of interest, both in terms of pedagogy and my research. With November upon us, many people's minds naturally turn to exam writing, so I thought I'd kick off with a return to some timeworn questions that are worthy of revisiting periodically : Open book or closed book exam? Word limits or no word limits? Obviously, there's no one right way to do things, and it's clear that each choice has both advantages and disadvantages. I am very interested in hearing others' views and philosophies.

 

I have usually given open-book-open notes-open-everything-not-electronic exams in Contracts and in my upper level electives. The exams typically consist of essay questions, and each question typically has had a word limit.  I aim to simulate and test the skills students will employ in actual practice (as best as the artifice of the exam will permit) by refraining from asking them to engage in memorizing items that they will never need to memorize (Restatement provision numbers and the like) and having them focus on engaging in issue spotting, rule synthesis, legal analysis, argument crafting, etc.

 

What I do not want to do is to reward the person who can type the fastest,  allow someone to  amass credit each time she writes things that are technically correct, albeit perhaps not completely salient or even relevant, or make it passable to  pre-can a bunch of prose by copying or paraphrasing from a treatise and dump it on the page without knowing how to apply it; hence the word limits. I also do not want to permit a gaming of the exam, whereupon upon being told that he can only bring in an assigned Supplement or an outline of however many pages, a clever student engages in a “write the Constitution on a grain of rice”-style inscription of other sources' material onto or into permissible (or permissible-looking) formats; hence the “open-everything” permissiveness.

The word limits are designed to discourage and weed out those who approach an exam according to a "checklist" approach. Such students, upon being confronted with a variety of complex issues, automatically revert to a "checklist" of issues and explanations. ("Consideration does not look to be at issue here. Consideration is a requirement for a valid, enforceable contract that has been defined as requiring...").  However, I find that the combination of the open-everything policy and the word limits is not optimal for everyone.  Too many students fall prey to the lure of access to all materials during an exam and revert to blind copying of sources, when I suspect that if left to their own devices and forced to confront the material, they'd perform better.

Despite my admonition to my class each year that the best students will study for the exam as though it were, in fact, closed book, I find that a good deal of the class later admits to having gone into what I call “Pigpen” mode. These students report that during the exam, they spent an inordinate amount of time rustling frantically through pages of books, notes, and treatises, kicking up dust reminiscent of that which surrounds the Peanuts character Pigpen. Moreover, despite my warning that the students who do the best on my exams report that they spend more time engaging with the questions and fact patterns before them, these students report that having been allowed to bring in so many materials, they can't seem to put them down once they're in the exam. I am considering switching to a closed book format in the future, and I am very interested in hearing others' philosophies and approaches.

On a final note, I am interested in others' views on whether affirmatively wrong information on an exam ought to result in an affirmative deduction of points (or decline in scoring, no matter how that's done) or whether it should just be as if the student wrote nothing. I realize that when you're grading on a curve (especially with a word limit like mine), I might be describing a distinction without much of a difference. Lately, however, I have been thinking about the idea that in practice, one of the worst things an attorney can do is purport to have insight or information when, in fact, she has the underlying concepts all wrong. Should exam grading mirror this judgment?   Or is spotting an issue, albeit in a manner that's rife with mistakes, always better than overlooking it?