Legal Commentary

Yesterday, there was an interesting discussion at a faculty brown bag lunch I attended. The topic of discussion was how law professors grade exams. Assuming that you give an essay exam with more than one question, you have two options: (1) You can read student A's exam in its entirety, assign a score, move on to student B's exam, do the same, move on to student C's exam, etc.; or (2) You can read student A's answer to question 1, assign a score, read student B's answer to question 1, do the same, move on to student C's answer to question 1, etc. I call option 1 "Exam by Exam" grading and option 2 "Question by Question" grading (or exam hopping).

It seems to me that both approaches have pros and cons. With the exam by exam approach, you get a better sense of each student's entire exam. Was this an exam that was extremely well written and organized throughout? Did it seem like this student was doing gangbusters on the first several questions and simply ran out of time on the last question(s)? These questions can easily be answered when a professor takes it one exam at a time. The main con seems to me to be selective information processing, the unconscious inclination to search out and recall information that tends to confirm one's existing belief and devalue disconfirming evidence. When I used to grade exams using this approach, I found myself fighting this bias. Basically, when a student had a great first answer or answers, I tended to be more forgiving of later errors, figuring that these must have been silly mistakes because obviously the student knew the material well. And if a student started poorly, my assumption was that later great answers were more the product of luck than skill. Now, I think that I was able to combat this bias for the most part, and I think that most professors can as well, but it is definitely something to take into account.

With the question by question approach, the professor has the advantage of comparing apples to apples. The professor can read each student's answer to question 1 back-to-back-to-back and more easily apply the same standard to each individual question. The main con is that a professor applying this approach sacrifices some of the big picture analysis mentioned above (Personally, I follow the question by question approach, and, after scoring the last question on each exam, read the prior questions again so that I can (a) correct any prior mistakes, and (b) see the exam as a whole).

So, which approach do you use and why? You can respond by answering the following poll and/or leaving a comment.

-Colin Miller