Legal Commentary

At the Faculty Lounge, Tim Zinnecker has a post complaining about students confusing "it's" and "its" on their exams.  One commenter who identifies himself as a law student notes that he recently misused the word on a recent exam but, because time was short, was required to "hurry right along, and there just wasn't any time to correct errors."  He counsels Zinnecker give his students "a break.  They're doing the best they can."

Zinnecker was just blowing off steam, not threatening to take points off the exam.  I don't take points off exams for such things either, even though I notice a distressing number of such errors, along with what I would call an over-casualness about larding up exams with abbreviations, contractions, and other short-cuts.  And I certainly think some of these errors are inadvertent and, in a sense, relatively blameless --although I hope my students would not need a spell-checker to catch these mistakes if they were writing without time  constraints!  (One of the commenters on Zinnecker's post, however, notes that he is observing an increasing number of similar errors in papers, not just exams.)

Errors happen, of course.  But what I find interesting about them, and about their seemingly increasing number, is not so much what they reveal about actual educational failings -- like I said, I am assuming the students know better and would correct the errors if they had more time -- but about the casualness with which some students treat these errors.  It is true that time is short on exams.  But I cannot think of any of my students who would, assuming away the problem of being arrested, show up naked to write their exams because they just couldn't be bothered to spend the time getting dressed and thought it might save them a few minutes to show up au naturel.  It's not just that they fear being laughed at by others, I think; it's that they've so thoroughly internalized the social norm against public nudity that they just wouldn't do it.  It would be unthinkable to them.  There are some conventions they just couldn't break.  Similarly, and taking away the problem of public humiliation, I have never experienced a student who, e.e. cummings-like, didn't bother with capitalizing the beginning of sentences on an exam, even though the same argument raised by the commenter on Zinnecker's post, that it would save time and he couldn't be bothered to correct this basic error, would hold true here.  To write in this way would for most students be unthinkable; however short time might be on the exam, they except this convention as part of the cost of writing.

I wonder whether that is the real reason we profs seem to see more of these kinds of errors on exams: the sense on the part of some or many students that if inadvertent errors pop up, and even if they notice them, they should just be treated as forgivable errors and ignored by student and grader alike.  They're no big deal.  There is not a sufficient sense of shame tied to these errors for the student to just assume that correcting them is part of the cost of doing business and a necessary expenditure of time for any piece of writing, including a time-sensitive exam.  (Let alone doing so on a paper!)  I don't doubt that such errors occurred from time to time in my own exams, and for that matter in my blogging.  But on the whole, I would correct any grammatical or spelling errors I spotted while I was writing, no matter how inadvertent they were or how obvious the meaning of what I was writing was, simply because to do otherwise would be almost as unthinkable as forgetting to put on my clothes before heading out the door for the exam.  

I grant you that conventions change; it was not unthinkable for me to show up to the exam without my tie, for example, as it might have been a few decades earlier (or currently on the Virginia bar exam, to quote one less-than-quaint anachronism).  But I think it is still worth reflecting on, and lamenting, the possibility that many of the errors we spot on exams are there not because the students were unaware of them, or because they were ignorant of the rules they were accidentally breaking, but because they were both aware of the errors and indifferent to them.  As I said, I am not inclined to mark down these kinds of things, so clearly I am willing to give these students a break.  But I'm not sure it's right to say they're doing the best they can, as the commenter on Zinnecker's post did.  If that's so, then in some cases we really should fear for our educational system, and perhaps we ought to start marking down or failing students altogether.  But it may be that some of these students are just doing the best they're willing to do, and that this willingness doesn't include a strong desire to appear fully literate to their peers and their professors.  And that is, or should be, literally a shame -- assuming that shame still exists for transgressions less glaring than naked exam-writing.