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! :)

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?

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.

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.