Collaboration on Examinations
by
Douglas R. Haddock

During the past 15 years, in almost all of my exams, I have used a simple process designed to make examinations a learning experience as well as a means of evaluating performance. About two weeks before classes end, I distribute to students a document titled "Information on Facts and Law." I present a story that involves a fair amount of detail with the potential for numerous legal questions and disputes relevant to the subject matter of the course. The document also contains a variety of statements about the law and usually includes a number of pertinent statutes. I inform students that most of the examination problems will be based on the facts and legal doctrine presented. I encourage students to study the document in preparation for the exam and to ponder what legal questions and problems might arise. Students take this advice seriously and often become engaged in the process, preparing for real examination problems in a meaningful way. In studying and discussing the material with other members of the class, students create and work through their own problems and thereby gain a better sense of the subjects they have studied. Many students, I believe, find this focused and creative review the most valuable learning experience of the semester, one that takes them far beyond what I can cover in a three-hour examination.

In recent years, going a step beyond this "focused and creative review," I have given a number of take-home examinations in which students have been allowed to collaborate. On two occasions, I set no limits on the number of students who were permitted to work together. In other exams, I have limited the size of the groups. In no case have I required students to work with others on the exam, although some colleagues have suggested that I should. Based on student response, I have come to the tentative conclusion that collaborative exams can be effective in helping many students better learn legal theory and doctrine and develop the skills involved in resolving legal problems. I allowed collaboration in the final exams for my first-year Property I and II classes in 2001-2002. In the fall of 2001, however, I divided the exam into two parts, allowing collaboration on only half of the exam.

Concerns about Collaboration on Exams

The prospect of allowing law students to collaborate on final examinations presents some issues for both the professor and the students. My primary concern is that the process presumably compromises, to some degree, the evaluative function of exams. When groups of individuals are graded on the basis of a collaborative effort, some students' grades will be different from the grades those individuals would have received working alone. This criticism, usually stated in terms of a free-rider problem, is the main one voiced by students. This is a significant concern, and it is one reason I combined collaboration and individual work in my fall semester exam this year. Based on conversations with students after that fall semester exam, however, I am concerned that this might have created an undesirable group dynamic. I would have more reservations if most or all of the students' grades in any given semester were based on collaborative work. In this sense, perhaps I am a free-rider among my colleagues.

I don't know whether there is any way to establish empirically the effect of collaboration on grades, but I have gathered some pertinent and interesting information. For the fall semester exam in 2000 I compared the Property grades of each of my students with the grades they received in three other first-year courses. Of 156 students (two sections), I identified 14 examples of "potentially significant deviation" between the grades students received in Property compared with the grades they received in other courses. The test I used for "potentially significant deviation" was this: The Property grade in these examples was at least three grade levels lower or higher than any grade the student received in the three other courses. (We use a ten-grade system from "A" to "F." There are no "A+" grades and no pluses or minuses on grades of "F" or "D.") A Property grade of "B" and all other grades of "C" or below would represent a potentially significant deviation. In six cases the Property grade was at least three grade levels higher, and in eight cases it was that much lower than the students' other grades. Twelve of these students worked with others on the exam and two worked alone.

I also have concerns about various dilemmas students might face because of the opportunity to collaborate. The students are free to choose those they will work with on the exam. I worry that a few students might not successfully find collaborators even though they would like to do so. Some colleagues have suggested that I should assign the groups, but I've resisted doing so. On the other hand, some students seem to feel compelled to collaborate because they assume a group will have an advantage over an individual. Based on my experience, this is a mistaken assumption. The grades of individual exam-takers have consistently followed essentially the same pattern as those of groups.

Benefits of Collaboration on Exams

Whatever the drawbacks of permitting collaboration on examinations, my impressions at this point are that the advantages outweigh any disadvantages. The primary benefit of collaboration on exams is that it seems to help many students learn the subject matter and develop the skills of practicing law more effectively than ordinary course work and traditional examinations. Evidence of this proposition has consistently surfaced in surveys I have taken and in conversations I have had with students. Three first-semester students had rather vigorously contended with me, in a good-natured way, over the prospect of being allowed to collaborate on the exam. They felt that each student's performance should be evaluated and graded on its own merits. That semester I did give a collaborative exam, and these three students decided to work together. One of the three visited my office some weeks later to tell me he had changed his opinion. He and his colleagues had spent the exam period in a cabin somewhere in the Texas hill country, and he described those two or three days as the most beneficial learning experience he had ever had.

Overall, I believe that student opinion on collaboration in examinations has been favorable. Consider the responses given by students to a request that they rate the fall 2000 Property exam as a teaching/learning device: Excellent - 46 students; Good - 63 students; Neutral - 17 students: Poor - 7 students; Very Poor - 3 students. In other words, 80 percent of the students thought the collaborative exam was either excellent or good as a learning experience, and only 7 percent thought it was poor or very poor. Based on these surveys and numerous conversations with students over the past seven years, I believe that collaboration on some examinations can produce beneficial learning experiences for many law students.