Legal Commentary

Having completed another round of exam grading (including, on an Admin Law exam, a delightful misidentification of Vermont Yankee v. NRDC as Yankee Candle), I am recalling a discussion on Prawfs some time ago of spelling and grammar on exams.  I forget the details of that exchange, so maybe it was mentioned back then, but I was struck this exam cycle by the difference in eloquence between word-processed and handwritten exams.  As any prof can attest, word processed exams often suffer from severe cases of misspellings and poor sentence constructions.  I saw far less of this on the (admittedly few) handwritten exams I read this time around. 

It's not that hard to figure out what's going on: students on word processors just power through sentences and paragraphs, since they can always correct the most egregious stylistic problems, even if they leave a lot of them uncorrected.  By contrast, handwriters have to think before each sentence.  It's an odd inversion of a wonderful Russell Baker "On Language" column from the New York Times Magazine back in 1987 or 88, which consisted of a series of sentences, all uncompleted, all of which were supposed to constitute the first sentence of an essay on how much easier writing had become since the word processor.  Of course a writer of Baker's quality (and, of course, with more time than a student on an exam) would constantly rewrite that first sentence.  Our students don't, at least on exams.

I wonder if this phenomenon affects student writing in contexts beyond exams.  Do they get accustomed to writing poorly, because if they write poorly they can write quickly?  Is there some step of mental processing that gets skipped when you don't take a moment to compose your sentence in your head before you commit it to paper or a screen?  If there is a step skipped, does that skipping occur in other contexts?  Does it even seep into their oral communication?

Maybe instant messaging and tweeting have far more impact on this effect, assuming it even exists.  But I have to believe students are more serious about what's on their exam paper than what's in their tweets.  To that extent, their willingness to turn in what I have been seeing more and more over the past few years is cause for concern. Perhaps technology calls for a rethinking of how we test; in particular, maybe we shouldn't be giving racehorse exams any more, or not making them so "racehorsey," if doing so in a laptop-heavy environment leads to the kind of mishmash we've all been seeing.  Or we could just ban laptops on exam.  But who wants to go back to deciphering hundreds of pages of rushed handwriting?