Legal Commentary

Back in 2006, Steve Vladeck did a post about what type of "punishment" there should be for a student exceeding the word limit on an exam. He noted that his "[t]enative course of action [w]as to grade the answer it its entirety, and then reduce it in proportion to the percentage of excess words." The post prompted vigorous commenting, with different commenters suggesting proposed punishments ranging from not reading a single word beyond the word limit to giving the student no credit. Other commenters speculated that professors rarely, if ever, enforce word limits, leading to students who played by the rules being treated unfairly.

The discussion made me gun-shy about imposing word limits when I became a professor, and the decision I made was to test the waters by giving exams without word limits my first few years to see how often a word limit would even apply. So far, the answer for me has been "not very often." For instance, last semester, I had 182 students, and of those, 164 wrote exams that contained fewer words than the hypothetical word limit I had in my head (4,000 words for a 4 hour exam, 3,000 words for a 3 hour exam), i.e., slightly less than 10%. 

Of the remaining 18, 5 students wrote A exams that went into more depth on the main issues than most exams and/or identified legitimate issues that most exams did not address. 7 students simply used a very deliberate IRAC method on each issue and sub-issue. And 6 students threw in everything but the kitchen sink, bringing up issues that really weren't raised under any reasonable reading of the exam(s). My conclusions: (1) a word limit would have no (direct) effect on the vast majority of my students, be "unfair" to some of my best and brightest students, and have the consequence I intended for, at most, slightly more than a handful of students; and (2) if I were to impose a word limit, it would be a "soft" word limit, not a "hard" word limit.

Of course, there are several purposes served by word limits. When students become lawyers, they will be subject to official word limits while writing for the courts. They will also be subject to unofficial word limits while writing for their superiors, who often want them to get to the heart of the issue and not its extremities. Word limited exams lead to more concise exams for professors to grade and probably incentivize careful discussion of the main issues on the exam instead of the classic brain dump. All of these pros might have led me to consider word limits if I had many students exceeding my hypothetical word limit(s), but, as I noted above, that has not been the case. This has led me to decide not to impose "hard" word limits on future exams without even taking account the cons. And there are a few cons:

-What do you do with students who handwrite their exams? In law school, I remember that "word limit" professors imposed a limit on the number of bluebooks that these students (including myself) could use, but this neither correlated perfectly with the word limit nor took into account the differences in handwriting size among students;

-While students will have to learn to write efficiently when they become lawyers, the product that they turn over to their superiors or the court is (usually) not their first draft, but something that they have edited over at least a couple of drafts. When someone goes over the word limit in a time constrained exam, they (often) won't have the time to be able to edit out the surplusage before the clock strikes 0 (The problem is heightened for students handwriting their exams but ameliorated when professors give 8 or 24 hour take home exams with word limits);

-Word limits seem to me to constitute unfair Tiger-proofing (or, I guess it would be the opposite of Tiger-proofing) for the best and brightest students I identified above; and

 

-While, according to my calculations, imposing a word limit would have a direct effect on only a few students, my law school experience was that word limits cause unnecessaryfagita for many more. I knew many law students (including myself) who never came close to the word limit on any exam but still stressed about the limit before and during each such exam.

While I have thus abandoned the idea of using a "hard" word limit, I have considered adopting a "soft" word limit. Under a "soft" word limit, I would simply tell students throughout the semester that while there is no specific word limit on the final exam, efficiency is a virtue. In other words, students who give me a tangential history of rules/exceptions, address rules/exceptions not raised by the fact pattern, etc. can expect to not do as well as students who give me just the facts (and the law) ma'am.

It seems to me that a "soft" word limit would serve each of the pros I mentioned above while avoiding the cons. Students would still learn the value of efficient writing, and their exams would be more concise and in depth and less of a brain dump. There would be no need to worry about the differences between typed and written exams, the best and brightest wouldn't suffer, students wouldn't need to hastily edit to get under a "hard" word limit, and, well, students would still stress, but it would seem to me to be a more constructive stress.

Of course, this is all conjecture on my part because I have yet to use either a "hard" or a "soft" word limit. So, do you impose a word limit, and if so, what type? Why did you choose the method you use, and how has it turned out?