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When I guest blogged here last April, I posted an entry entitled The Professorial Second Opinion: Should Law Professors be Able to Change Student Grades After Exam Conferences? From that post and the comments to it, I gathered that many law schools allow professors to change grades based upon computational errors, such as assigning 5 points to a student's discussion of a hearsay exception but failing to add those points to the student's final score, but do not allow professors to change grades based upon qualitative errors, such as failing to notice that a student addressed the same hearsay question on the same evidence exam (or failing to recognize the quality of the student's answer).

The post then addressed reasons why schools might allow grade changes after exam conferences (e.g., the unfairness of a student with an A exam getting a B grade based upon the professor's error) and why they might not (e.g., the squeaky wheel gets the grease). The post went on to discuss an alternative to professors changing grades: student reviewers. The post then concluded that the best way to address the issue is simply to have professors avoid it, with one good way being for professors voluntarily to re-score any exam within a couple of points of the next higher grade cut-off before submitting their grades. Of course, this could also be a grade changing policy adopted by law schools. Many states have procedures for regrading exams that fall just short of the passing line. Maybe law schools not otherwise allowing grade changes could allow professors to change grades that were only a couple of points short of the next higher grade cut-off. Of course, it could be argued that such a procedure would be unfair because it would allow grade changes when professors made minor grading errors but disallow grade changes when professors made major grading errors. 

As one of the commenters to my original post noted, another technique is to allow professors to change student grades, but only when a professor admits the mistake at a faculty meeting and the faculty approves the change. So, where do you stand? Again, you can give your take by leaving a comment and/or responding to the following poll.

 

-Colin Miller