Law school grades

As the new semester gets underway, there's a fair amount of grade angst at various law student blogs.  Energy Spatula has a post that attracted lots of comments, wherein she bemoans her grades:

I worked harder last quarter than I ever worked 1L year, or in my entire academic life for that matter, and you know what?

My grades suck. They are stupendously bad. Not "drop out of law school to work at Burger King" bad. Or "They're gonna kick me out due to my total inability to learn the law and apply it to a hypothetical fact pattern" bad (even though it's true and they should). But subpar. Sub-curve-par. One or more standard deviations below the mean.

Iowa law student bloggers have also made various grade angsty comments.  (See here and here.)

Granted, there may be some randomness to grading, but one thing I don't get is why students who don't understand why they're getting the grades that they do aren't going to the professors to look at their exams? [See Update 2 below]  Not to try to score more points on the exam, but rather to see if there are some systemic mistakes that can be corrected.  It may be that the student actually understands the material fine but is writing the answers in a jumbled, incoherent mess, in which case it would be relatively easy to improve one's grades: outline your answer on scratch paper first, then write the answer in the bluebook in a well-structured way.

UPDATE: An Iowa law school alum asks:

Also, although I am interested in hearing your view on the subject, I wonder to what extent Iowa's mandatory curve (especially in 1L) courses actually drives the exam structure, content, and grading.

I don't think about the mandatory curve when writing the exam, except to the extent that I always worry that the exam won't create a broad spread, in which case small differences in raw score get magnified by the curve.  But that hasn't really happened during my five semesters of teaching, and I am constantly assured by my more experienced colleagues that they always get curves.

In fact, since I try to write my exams to have different types of questions, in some ways I complicate things for myself curve-wise.  For example (as is clear from examining my old exams, which I make available on reserve), I usually ask one policy-type of question.  It's possible that students who do well with the application of law to fact questions might not do well on the policy, or vice versa.  (Or of course, they might do well on both, or poorly on both.)  If all I did was ask one type of question, I'd be likely to see the same general spread of performance on each question.

UPDATE 2: I should have made clear here that I am not suggesting that Energy Spatula does not in fact check her exams.  I was using her post as a springboard to make an observation relative to my experience as a law professor, and obviously that doesn't encompass her, since she's not a student at Iowa.

Comments

[Dylan]

I quite going to my professors to look at my tests because it only convinced me of the utter incompetence of my professors. There's no way that Torts exam didn't deserve an A. And International Business Transactions guy isn't just older than dirt, he's clealry senile.

[Iowa Law School Alum]

Prof. Yin,

Although I agree that students generally don't take the time to adequately determine and then resolve their systemic exam taking mistakes, I think that it is often easier said than done. In particular, the fact that law school exams are generally administered once a semester per a course, have variation among law professors, and are not necessarily indicative of the material covered in the course (in my experience this was the exception rather than the rule).

While at Iowa, I found it was very difficult to find a consistent exam taking approach, especially where the Professors tested so differently. For example, in contracts we had a 8 hour take-home exam, in property, we had a 100 multiple choice exam, in another law school class, we had to draft a client memo and/or legal pleading. Thus, I found that feedback pertaining to one exam did not necessarily translate into something that I could apply going into a different exam.

Not to mention, there is such a variation in the way particular subjects are taught and then tested. The 1L courses seem to be testing for an understanding of theorectical legal concepts whereas the upper level courses exams to be more practical (i.e. writing and drafting actual legal pleadings).

Also, although I am interested in hearing your view on the subject, I wonder to what extent Iowa's mandatory curve (especially in 1L) courses actually drives the exam structure, content, and grading.

In essence, I think the challenge for current law students is to find exam taking consistency, especially where the exam process is very much inconsistent.

[Tung Yin]

Dylan: uh, yeah. You aren't the type to show up with a gun to your professor's office, are you?

Iowa Law Alum: You raise some interesting and fair points.

First, I hope it's clear that I'm not suggesting that every student would automatically benefit from reviewing exams. They may or may not. But someone who gets consistently lower than expected grades may, because the variability of type of exam isn't showing up in the performance of the student.

(As an aside, I think if a student finds that the type of exam has a positive correlation with his/her grades, that's relatively easy to fix, since you can always take classes that grade in the more advantageous format. I don't particularly advise that if it drives you away from certain classes, but it's obviously something that students already weigh.)

So, you are right that reviewing performance on an in-class essay exam may not be very useful for a multiple choice exam, etc. But there are only so many formats, and review of a set of exams in format X may be useful for subsequent exams in format X.

[energy spatula]

Prof. Yin,

I went to both the professors from whom I received terrible grades about the exams in question. In one case, the professor had "miscounted" my score by 10 points, which unfortunately didn't change my grade "letter" but did raise extreme doubts in my mind about his ability to grade carefully (the second time in two years I have found a significant grading error on an exam). The other professor told me "the exams were all really good, and were within a few points of each other, but there is a curve and someone has to be at the bottom."

I do absolutely look over my exams and try to learn from my mistakes, however, in both cases I *truly* thought I had done a passable job, and in the case of one professor, I had him last year, the exam was the same format, and I did great last year and terrible this year.

Further, I haven't consistently gotten lower than expected grades...last year I did fine, by which I mean "in line with my expectations." Anyway, just wanted to clear up that I did, in fact, make the effort to seek out my prof's and try to get some insight...I just didn't get much out of it, except "well, each professor expects something different and here's a big long speech about what I want/expect even though you probably won't have me again ever."

[Dylan]

Prof,

I am that type, but I always try not to behave according to type.

[Just plain confused]

Okay, didn't do too well the first semester of law school. Second semester, I read evreything, memorized rules, took expensive writing workshop classes, attended study groups, studied previous "A" papers, knew every issue on the test, IRACd, argued both sides, and still bombed.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? I've spoken with Professors in the past, took their advice, attended TA sessions . . . How do you know everything on the test, know how to write the test, and do everything they tell you to do and you STILL don't pass?