Legal Commentary

Just a quick post based on a conversation I had with a colleague the other day: he mentioned that he might give three questions on an exam and ask students to answer all of them. But he also asks them to choose one of the questions they think they did the best on so that will be worth twice as much. E.g., three questions worth 25 points each, but the one question chosen by the student to double up on will in fact be worth 50 points, while the others remain at 25 points each, for a total of 100.

update: I neglected to mention that the student also gets the choice to diversify, such that each of the n questions count for 1/n of the exam points, so students have the choice to avoid making a decision wrt their confidence levels.

I thought this was pretty interesting and hadn't heard of its use in the annals of law teaching. As far as I can tell, the skill underlying the choice of which question to select is figuring out one's own confidence levels in an answer. I can imagine that this might be a helpful skill for lawyers to have in a few situations, such as when a client asks you what the law is on a particular area and you need to be able to assess your confidence levels on the fly. But I'm not really sure that's typically how life in law practice works. Moreover, it's hard to understand what a student might do to prepare in advance of being asked to make such a selection.  How do you develop stronger confidence levels without distorting what you study simply to create a strong suit? Do you solve that "problem" simply by not telling students in advance that this selection strategy will be used on the exam?

That said, if you think of grading as simply a sorting and signaling device, then it's less of a big deal, but still: what are we trying to signal by testing the relative competence of one's selection of confidence levels? I can't tell yet if this is an assessment strategy worth considering adoption in my own courses;  I'm not sure the gains outweigh the benefits costs: am I missing anything?