Law School Grades
Now that my second year grades are closed, I can’t help but reflect upon how much getting law school grades back is like playing the lottery. It’s true that the same effect was true for me as a physics undergrad with respect to exams, but it’s slightly more frightening since our entire grade usually depends on one exam.
Strangely, I find that I do the best on the exams that I feel terrible about directly afterwards. At first this seems counter-intuitive, but now that I think about it, I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’ve grasped enough material to realize that I couldn’t possibly have written about everything relevant. When I walk out of an exam feeling great, maybe I’ve underestimated or over-simplified the problem. Of course, maybe I’m just bad at gauging these things.
So here’s a question for the LG readers: have you ever (1) reviewed a final exam; or (2) disputed a grade? I’m always curious about this kind of thing. I’ve never looked at any of my finals because I usually just want to forget about the whole final experience until the following semester, but it’s crossed my mind on a few occassions that it could help me figure out where people are taking off points.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Related posts:
I reviewed my first semester exams; other than that I haven’t really looked at them. I’ll probably look through Trusts & Estates when I get back in term, though, just because I’m curious as to what exactly I wrote.
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
@ouij: Heh, that will likely be an eye opening experience for me. It’s very likely my exams are at best not exactly what I intended to say, and at worst nonsensical.
I should really make time to proofread my exams, but I generally run pretty close to the wire.
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ouij Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
@Joshua Auriemma, Exam timing is tricky. I usually finish right on time, within a few minutes. I finished Trusts & Estates with plenty of time to spare–a good thing, too, since I was able to catch several errors and correct them. On the other hand, in 1L, I didn’t finish Torts, and ended up getting one of my best grades in law school. Like I said, by now I have a fair idea of how I can improve my exam performance. The only reason I’d go back and review an exam would be to read what I actually wrote, and laugh at my own errors.
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I reviewed 2 of my first semester exams, none of my second semester. I would love to take the time to sit down and read them through without the pressure of being in the exam itself, but my school doesn’t make them available – we have to go to office hours, and some professors are more accessible than others. The one exam from second semester I wanted to review was given by a visiting professor, so I don’t even know how I would access it.
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
@littlefrogling, I’ve been wondering about our policy as well. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the administrative people secretly reading my blog will clear it up for me.
I’m also in the same position re: visiting professor, though. I only *really* want to review my evidence exam from this semester (mostly because I thought it was my strongest class, and I was clearly wrong) but the professor is off to Texas. Bleh.
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littlefrogling Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
@Joshua Auriemma, I’m in evidence next semester, and I’m a little terrified – I’ve heard it’s a difficult class, but it’s a pre-req for other things and I’m considering trying out for mock trial in the fall, so it must be done.
I’d like to review my crim law exam – I’m not sure how I so terribly dropped the ball on that one, but she’s back in Kansas now, so I guess I’ll just have to go through life wondering hahaha
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I reviewed most all my first semester exams, and am thinking about asking to do the same for my 2nd semester ones. There are some of my professors who tell us up front, “You’re not going to see many marks,” so they’re basically telling us “You won’t get much out of it.” However, even in those cases, my prof made the high-scoring exam available to review as well. Since I could take my exam and view it next to the “best” exam, I could at least see the major differences.
Some 1L professors–knowing we are vulnerable 1Ls who don’t know how to take a law school exam–actually put several comments. Sometimes it was just “conclusory,” “shallow analysis,” or a mark noting a missed issue. Again, then I could compare to the best exam to see what I missed.
What did I learn? I learned from my first semester that usually, my factual analysis was pretty good, but I was missing issues (either a “whole” issue, or some branch or piece of doctrine within an issue). This told me that my 2nd semester, I needed to do more “issue spotting” practice using practice questions with at least an outline of all the issues in the question. If I spot it (and the sub-issues), I can talk about it.
A friend realized from looking at his exams that he would “see” the issue, but thought it was so obvious as to not talk about it. Another person saw most of the issues, but didn’t use all the facts to argue them (too conclusory).
In all these cases (for us anyway!), reading our exams are no magic bullet for improved grades, because it’s still like a “lottery” as you said. But what it allows you to do it get more of the professor’s “raw” points more of the time. Given that the curve forces you to be all about the margin, a slight bump in raw points can make a real difference in grades. My average was about the same the second semester, but I was almost weirdly consistent in the grades I got.
I’m thinking about going back again, and asking profs to see the 2nd semester exams. I doubt they will have as many comments, but it may be useful. Of course, for profs that use a “weird” format (multiple choice, short answer) this doesn’t work so well.
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
@Warren, Interesting, thanks for your thoughts / experience. I’m sort of inspired to go look at my old exams now. Maybe I can make a day of it.
Better late than never, right?
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ouij Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
@Warren, I TA’ed this past academic year, and I can tell you that nothing did more to hone my own exam preparation than having to sit and mark up the practice problems I’d assign my section of 1Ls. Actually having to *read* responses gave me a real insight into what I’d want to read, and thus, what I should give my readers.
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We get all our exams back (at least first year, don’t know what will happen next year). I reviewed all my exams last semester and took my 2 lowest grades in to talk with the profs about what I should do to do better. I actually (surprisingly?) got really good feedback from one prof in particular and had a night and day experience taking his final this semester. I was so much more comfortable.
I don’t know if I will go through this spring’s once I get them back. Probably not until later, as I’m not entirely sure what good it will do me going into next year.
I think the process can be very helpful, depending on your profs. All of my 1L profs designated special office hours to talk with us individually about our exams (if we wanted). For me, it was helpful (plus, face time w/ the prof is good too). For others, maybe not.
Oh, and we also went over M/C too, except that our school locks up the questions so it was just from memory (#21, what was that again? Oh, right…battery). Still, made me feel more in control of it, I guess. And the illusion of control is very comforting sometimes.
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 16th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
@Chere, You get all your exams back? Genius! Where do you go to school?
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Chere Reply:
June 17th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@Joshua Auriemma, if I told you that I’d have to kill you :)
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 17th, 2009 at 9:48 am
@Chere, Can I guess? :p
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Chere Reply:
June 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am
@Joshua Auriemma, I try to keep my location anonymous but if you want to guess I can’t really stop you! :)
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Responses from Twitter:
@efink: I’ve had a fair number of students — both 1L and upper level — meet to review their exams. I hope they find it helpful.
@jur1st: depends on what you got
@Gpipoly: I usually review the exams that didn’t match how I expected to do. I notice though that many want to review their good ones.
@veeseekay: i don’t ever want to think about it again.
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To amplify my Twitter response: at Elon Law, where I teach, we strongly encourage students, especially 1Ls, to meet with professors to review their exams. This is in sharp contrast to my experience as a law student, when the practice was all but unheard of (or at least I never knew or heard of anyone doing so).
The students who have met with me have included both those who did poorly and those who did extremely well. I do think it may be helpful, especially early on, for students who do well on exams to meet with the professor so that they can see just what they did right. Law review exams are an unusually opaque process compared to undergrad or even other grad school exams, so even strong and well-prepared students might not necessarily have a clear idea, at least the first few semesters, what the professor is looking for. That was certainly my experience, having gone to law school after graduate school in another field; I got good grades on my 1L exams, but wasn’t at all sure how. Finally by 2nd year, I’d cracked the code and figured out what I was doing right.
Among the students who had done poorly, I’ve not yet had anyone dispute their grade. If that were to happen, my approach would be to apply something like a “clear error” standard for appellate review: no reversal for exercise of discretion, but only if there is an obvious mistake (for example, the student missed points for not addressing an issue, but it turned out the student did address it and I missed the page when grading — something I’m happy to say has not happened to me!).
I’m very interested in the student perspective on this issue, and I plan to share this post with my colleagues. Thank you for provoking the discussion.
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I went and asked about one exam because I got a really good grade but didn’t take the conventional route when we reviewed the exam as a class. There was one other exam that was reviewed as a class.
Other than that, I didn’t review exams. I developed a pretty good post-mortem plan for exams, and went I tanked it I had a pretty good idea about why.
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As per my tweet–It’s interesting to me that people around here [Toledo Law] seem to want to review the exams on which they did well. My thought has always been that if I get an A there is no need to review the test; my methodology of study clearly worked.
I can usually predict, within a “plus” deviation, how I did in any particular class, so while I want to see my exam below an A, not as badly as when the grade doesn’t match up at all. This has only happened once, where I was sure I aced and in fact got a B. I think most law students are lying to themselves when they say “I was sure I kicked the s**t out of that one.” Personally, I’ve developed a pretty good test-intuition about these things, but maybe I’m an outlier.
Suggestion for a related discussion topic because I’m curious about how others deal with stress: What are your pre-exam rituals, if any? Songs to pump you up? Particular pencils you use? Lucky garments?
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I actually had a grade changed this past year. There was a big process of emailing the professor for a break down and documenting his harsh responses that my paper simply, “was not superior”. Gee, thanks, but could you have done any better dumbo?
The professor and his class were an atrocity and since I had already made a formal complaint about his lack of preparedness and tardiness, I appealed the grade. Although I deserved the grade change, I think he crumbled under the Dean’s questioning and claimed it was a calculation error. Either way, I was very proud…not to get a better grade, but to successfully beat the little man down! :)
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M Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
@Blondini, I’m working on a documentary and I’m interested in the opinion you expressed above. Would you mind shooting me an e-mail so I can pick your brain? Thanks! mdesir[@]gmail[.]com (no brackets).
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