Monthly Archives: January 2006

I finally finished grading today — an activity that for me always re-enacts Parkinson’s Law.

I find grading very difficult and stressful. It takes a long time.

That it is dreadfully boring is not the worst of it, although it does seem to get more and more boring the more often I teach the same course (the questions change more than the errors do — an indictment of my teaching, no doubt). I feel it requires the utmost care, since the outcomes matter so much to the students. And while I am pretty sure that most of my grades would be the same were I to grade these again next month, especially the A’s B+’s C’s and down, there is a large mass of exams clustering around the C+/B border (we don’t have a B- grade here), where I am pretty sure a degree of randomness, or arbitrariness if you prefer, inevitably creeps in. These are exams with some virtues, far from lost causes, but they each bear several specimens from the menagerie of incommensurable vices. And I must reduce them to a number or letter.

The worst part of it is that I want the students all to do well. And of course they don’t all do well. Blah answers are bad enough. What really drives me ’round the bend are the aggressively wrong ones. How, I ask myself, could they be there in the room with me — and they were there, I take attendance — for so many hours and still think that? How could I have failed to communicate something so basic? And whether or not it was my fault, what will happen if they inflict this misunderstanding on clients? And how, now that they are out of my clutches, will I ever set them straight about it? And, oh look, it’s quite a while since my mind wandered….

We don’t have a curve except for first year students. And I usually let the chips fall where they may. This year, however, I graded a little differently from usual. Thanks to some prodding via a general memo to all the faculty from an Associate Dean, I was slightly more lenient this year. To begin with, in addition to the two-week attendance-taking moratorium right after Wilma, I forgave slightly more absences than I otherwise would have.

In Internet Law I rounded a few grades up instead of, as usual, rounding everything down. (The usual rule is less harsh than it sounds since I give a lot of generous class participation credit, which I find tends to inflate grades. Were I to round up routinely, between rounding and class participation credit, a lucky C+ could become a B+; that’s just too big a leap for me.)

In Administrative Law, I gave every student a 0.125 point (out of 4.0) ‘hurricane bonus’ which resulted in raising a substantial number of grades. Even so, to my surprise, this left me slightly under the five-year average grade distribution for core courses at UM as regards the number of A’s.

Since I submit exam grades on blind grading numbers and simultaneously hand in a list of who will get fixed quantities of class participation credit before I know who got which grade, I don’t have an obvious way to curve grades to achieve some predetermined quota, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t, particularly.

I will say this: if you got an A on my exam, or even as a final grade in my class, you earned it. (Students wishing to see the overall grade distribution for their class can find it at that class’s online presence. Individual grades are only available from the Registrar and via MyUM.)

I would love to teach an extra class in a week or two in which we all went over the exam and discussed it. But I fear that many of the students who would benefit the most from such a thing would not attend.

Fred Shapiro of Yale Law School has kindly allowed me to reproduce the following question which he posted to a constitutional law professors’ mailing list a few days ago:

I apologize for diverting attention from the very important substantive discussion of the Alito hearings with a question about the sociology of legal scholarship that may be too much elite-law-school-inside-baseball for many on this list, but here goes:

I notice that the New York Times “News Analysis” about the hearings this morning quotes Cass Sunstein of Chicago, Jack Balkin of Yale, Vikram Amar of Hastings, Mark Tushnet of Georgetown, John Yoo of Berkeley, Noah Feldman of NYU, Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine, Judith Resnik of Yale. It strikes me that no one from Harvard Law School is quoted, reminding me that I recently compiled data for a list of the most-cited law review articles of the last 10 years and found that Harvard Law School faculty figured on the list only minimally. I also found that none of the seven most-cited articles from that period were published in the Harvard Law Review, which has dominated all previous most-cited lists.

So I am wondering whether Harvard Law School may have in recent years dropped off the intellectual map of legal scholarship relative to its past position of great prominence? Does this ring true subjectively with any students of legal scholarship? (I realize that Harvard Law School may still kick ass in other aspects of its mission, such as training leaders of the bar or future Supreme Court justices or influencing the corporate world or influencing elites in foreign countries.)

This drew a reply, from Steve Burbank of Penn,

What a peculiar post, although perhaps not given the New Haven source. Since when do talking heads have anything to do with scholarship? One would have to see the full results, and consider the methodology, of the citation study in order to determine whether it is relevant to a question worth asking and what its probative value might be. Until then, I would hesitate to give this rumor legs.

To which Fred Shaprio answered,

I realize that talking heads does not equal scholarship, and the instance I cited may reflect nothing more than the characteristics of one reporter’s Rolodex. But I am suggesting that HLS’s influence on scholarship and constitutional law policy debates may have waned, and am looking whether this rings true subjectively with those who know much more about the substance and structure of legal scholarship than I do. (And, as this respondent suggests, I can’t necessarily get impartial assessments in New Haven!).

Fred Shapiro (Harvard Law School Class of 1980)

As a YLS ’87 grad, I expect to see some Harvard spirit in the comments.