Legal Commentary

I am halfway through my grading this term, and, as usual, I feel a certain level of guilt at the inadequacy of the feedback that we typically give to our students on their exams. If the only function of the exams is to help legal employers with their hiring decisions, then, of course, feedback is not terribly important. In my more naive moments, however, I imagine that exam-taking could be more than a painful sorting system. Instead, I imagine that it could be a continuation of the teaching process -- a sort of very intense final class -- in which students and prawfs could think about how the material fits together and have a class discussion about the problem.

For exams to serve that function, however, there has to be a feedback mechanism. Ideally, I'd like to have a "post mortem" class in which the students and I would all meet to go over the exam together. Instead, I write up and distribute a "model answer" with marginalia explaining how the arguments in the answer translate (roughly) into points. I also use old exams as hypothetical problems when teaching the course, so that the gap between preparing for the final and preparing for class can be minimized. I've attached my exam question (Download Hills Spring 2009 ARS Exam (Part 1)) and model answer (Download Model answer (with comments)) from this term's course in Administrative & Regulatory State, a mandatory first-year class here at NYU, to give you an idea of my feedback system. (Feel free to crib from the exam question, by the way, if you like it, keeping in mind that both question and model answer are now in the public domain and accessible by your own students).

It is not a very satisfactory system. Few students come by my office to discuss the exam, and I never know whether my model answer makes much sense or just adds to everyone's confusion. So I am curious whether other prawfs have discovered a better, or at least different, way of integrating the exam/evaluation system into the teaching of the course.