Some Creative Ideas for Student Evaluation

Participants at the Institute's 1994 summer conference contributed these imaginative ideas for evaluating law students:

Often toward the end of a course I tell students that there may be a policy question on the exam. I then give them a list of six policy questions and tell them that if a policy question appears, it will be one of the six. I also establish exam preparation rules: no outside research and no discussion of the possible questions except with classmates. I give them written guidance about what I look for in their answers.

This pre-exam list of possible policy questions has several positive results. First, especially for first-year students, exam anxiety seems to be reduced by the ability to think through and plan out answers beforehand. Students can walk into the exam with some idea of what to expect and feeling somewhat prepared and a little in control. Second, my exam preparation rules encourage students to prepare cooperatively rather than competitively, a value which I have as a goal in each of my classes. Third, different styles are accommodated to some extent. Students who are not quick on their feet, but who with time to reflect can do well, have a fairer chance to demonstrate their competence than on a traditional timed exam.

Finally, and most importantly to me, the nature of exam preparation (and thus review and internalization of the course) is lifted from memorizing rules to discussing and evaluating them, thus resulting in a higher level of learning. (I often include in my list of possible questions several which I have no intention of asking but on which I want students to focus as they pull the course together.)

Submitted by Lynn Daggett,
Gonzaga University School of Law

I use a video exam to evaluate lawyering skills. The students view a video depicting a lawyer performing one or more oral skills (e.g., interviewing or counseling a client, negotiating with another lawyer, cross-examining a witness, conducting a deposition, etc.) and then analyze and critique in writing what they observed on the monitor. Before viewing the video, students have reviewed file documents to help them understand the context. After the 10- to 15-minute video, but before writing their critiques, the students receive a transcript of the scene.

This assessment technique could be useful in several contexts: a clinical law course, a lawyering skills simulation course, an introductory first-year lawyering process course, or in a bar exam.

Submitted by Larry Grosberg,
New York Law School

In my 55- to 60-student classes in Civil Procedure, I give one-question multiple-choice quizzes in our Monday classes. Students know that they will be quizzed on Mondays based upon material that we have covered in the previous week.

Because the quiz consists of a single multiple-choice question, the quiz takes only about five minutes. Afterwards, we discuss the question and answers.

These quizzes serve several purposes. First, they are an incentive for the students to review each week's material on an on-going basis. Students have told me that the quizzes are very helpful in their review process. Second, the quizzes help me connect one week's material with the material that follows. After our discussion of a quiz, I typically summarize in a few sentences the material that we covered in the prior week and give students a synopsis of how that material relates to what we will cover during the present week. I have found that one of the major problems first-year law students have is making connections between individual cases and segments of material. The discussion that follows Monday morning quizzes gives me a good opportunity to help students make some of those connections.

The discussions that follow the quizzes often are significantly more animated than other class discussions, because students want to know why their answers were wrong or they attempt to convince me that credit should be given for an answer other than the "right" answer for which I was looking. Occasionally I will be convinced to give credit for an answer for which I had not planned to give credit, and I think that seeing me rethink the answers in this fashion may be a good demonstration for the class.

Third, the Monday quizzes give students some low-key feedback on their performance before their final exam. The quiz questions early in the semester are extremely easy. Also, although I give nine two-point questions over the course of the semester, no student can earn more than 14 points. Thus, students can miss one or two questions and still obtain the maximum number of quiz points. Because they can miss two questions without grade penalty, I also don't deal with situations in which students are sick and miss a class for this or other (legitimate or illegitimate) reasons. If I don't get a correct answer from them in a given week, they don't get their two points.

Because most students "max out" on their quiz points and the quizzes typically account for only about 15% of their total grade, the quizzes do not engender the pressures that surround final examinations. The quizzes also make students more comfortable in preparing for and taking final examinations.

I must acknowledge Professor Howard Brill of the University of Arkansas as the source of this idea.

Submitted by Larry Dessem,
University of Tennessee