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The grades for this semester are in. I am not a fan of grading although I was glad of the opportunity of potentially having an impact on students. I though the final exams were better than the early work they were doing, for the most part. I feel confident of their success on the bar exam being more likely because of our class. I also was glad to see that, in hindsight, a choice I’d made about class participation had paid off.

I don’t really remember how this worked when I was in law school or even library school. I do remember not always participating in class, sometimes studiously avoiding doing so. In library school, a colleague (who went on to an aeronautical library) and I played “Snakes and Apples” during the most tedious classes. As I heard one law student put it this last semester, if students aren’t paying attention, perhaps it’s an instructor’s class management that’s at fault rather than the students’ attention span.

When I picked up the class, the first thing I had to turn in was a syllabus. I had to have some calculation for the midterm and final exam, the two primary assessments. At that point, I hadn’t really considered the impact of formative and summative assessments. But the syllabus I inherited also had a section for class participation. The students would be scored based on

  • class participation (40%)
  • midterm exam (25%)
  • final exam (35%)

I remember not feeling great about the class participation component. What is class participation? And how do I measure it in a way that is fair? And what is its purpose, particularly in a class that is focused on the very independent skill of writing essays?

Measurement Management

As a long-time manager of people, I do not like to have a goal or performance requirement that can’t be measured. If someone works for me, and we agree on a goal or a measurement of their performance, they need to be able to know whether they are achieving it or not. It can’t be a subjective assessment. This seems particularly true in a classroom, where students are pitted against each other—particularly when a grading curve is involved—for their outcomes.

A good manager will have defensible measurements. I tend to lean towards an activity-based measurement because then the person accountable can count the activities. I need to publish 2 papers. I need to teach 1 class. I need to answer 50 reference questions or post 5 blog posts to the library’s blog.

The 40% class participation was framed very much around speaking in class, which also was a bit of a red flag for me. Not everyone wants to speak in class. It can be a confidence issue, it may be that they need more time to prepare their thoughts, or even that they’re just having a bad day. A class participation measurement that penalized those who didn’t participate didn’t seem very fair if the only activity was speaking.

There is one view that law students should suck it up and start to act like lawyers. That perspective would not give any latitude for (a) being uncomfortable speaking up or (b) not feeling well enough to participate verbally. I think that ignores how most lawyers work, where you often are given time to reflect before answering (a trial perhaps being the notable exception, and trials and trial-like activities like depositions or hearings may not be common in a given lawyer’s practice). I don’t adhere to those views.

By happenstance, then, I looked at this class participation in the same way I would if I was assigning work to a person I worked with. It had to be measurable. It had to be universally attainable: every student had to have the same ability to achieve the same goal. And it had to be relevant: we were in a writing class so, frankly, I didn’t care if they could speak or not about the content. I wanted them to be writing.

I landed on the pass/fail submission of assignments. Anyone who turned in something on time and that was responsive to the assignment got 100% of the points. Anyone who didn’t got 0%. It rewarded effort and, I think, recognized that, until the final exam, not everyone would have the same ability. These formative assessments allowed me to give feedback and, as importantly, allowed students to receive the feedback and course correct. But the assessments themselves weren’t a source of anxiety because there was nothing to ace: anyone who participated got the points.

Better Than Expected Outcomes

I was correct in thinking that some people wouldn’t put in the effort. I can imagine a number of reasons why. Perhaps they found the work boring. Or they thought that the assignments were busy work. Maybe their workload was just so heavy that this was an easy one to forego if their other homework carried weightier penalties.

Another truism I had heard often was that law students won’t do anything if there is no grade or points attached. I had initially thought this meant that the points had to have a gradation: the chance of an A, the threat of a C. In my situation, I didn’t see anyone choose the assignments they completed on point value. Some were 10 points, others were 40. Cumulatively, they added up to 240 in the semester. Someone could easily have decided to only do a couple of higher point assessments and still get most of the points. But I didn’t see anything like that.

What I hadn’t really considered was how this approach would impact students and the summative assessments, in particular the final exam. I remembered, and most students seem to still feel, that the final exam had a place of importance. Even though, in this case, it accounted for only 35% of the final grade, I still thought of it as the thing that would differentiate the higher marks from the lower marks.

Determinative, in other words. And anything with that importance, that can be that determinative, creates anxiety. I think the students were anxious about the final and I saw behavior change for it. In the past, some students would have completed an in-class assessment as quickly as possible—midterm included—and then leave. More students stayed in their chairs right up to the end for the final.

I was particularly glad about this. I gave a brief lecture about resources in class. Time, on the bar exam, is a key resource. Students are given the equivalent of 30 minutes per essay (really 180 minutes to complete 6, not 6 30-minute segments). There is no reason to yield a single minute of that time back to the bar examiners. The trick is to find a way to use as much of that time as possible without going over the allotted time.

In general, those students wrote very strong essays. I would hazard a guess that grades got better the longer people sat for the exam, although there were a couple of students who could write so quickly and clearly that, for this class, ending early didn’t reflect on their work.

But some students still struggled with the time. Their final exam scores reflected this, with questions going partly or entirely unanswered. There is no way to get points without something having been put down on the paper.

What was a pleasant surprise was to see that students who had made an effort through the entire semester, completing all of the intermediate assessments, using the feedback on the next assessment, were buoyed by that work. The final exam was not, for those students, determinative of their final grade. Students with strong final exams and strong class participation ended strongly. But in some cases, students whose final exam was not strong still ended strongly because of their earlier work

Work-Like Balance

One part of me is torn about this outcome. A summative assessment like a final exam should show whether a person has fulfilled the learning objectives for the class. This makes sense from a teaching perspective. But, shorn of measurable activity prior to that, I’m not sure it is very useful. If a student isn’t successful on the final exam, it may be hard to know why without additional work.

In particular, the formative assessments let me see students progress and find the path. That didn’t mean they didn’t still struggle, in particular with time-limited challenges. But, as with so many law classes, the goal isn’t perfection. The goal was a bar exam passable outcome. If a student struggled on the final exam, I could tell whether it was due to the time limits, or how they were organizing their work, or if it was the writing itself.

I found an article recently that helped me with my perspective. I can’t cite it because I can’t find it again and, while I have been doing a lot of reading on assessments recently, it has not re-surfaced. The gist was this: adopting a formative assessment heavy approach can provide a less anxiety-ridden approach to assessments for the students. I wish I had thought about or known of this mindset before I’d started this class. It makes perfect sense to me and I could have communicated this to the students.

Already, I had spent a lot of time impressing upon the students that, for our class, I didn’t care if they got the law right. In fact, I think there was too much focus on getting the right answer for the first half of the semester. Hence my repetitive reminders that getting the essay right, and within the time, was the primary goal. They could learn the law (a) later, (b) in greater depth, and (c) from someone who knew it. If their writing was strong, they could apply it to any substantive information.

When I teach again, I will be more deliberate about this. First, maintaining a heavy assessment approach before the final exam. This doesn’t mean “grade every assignment every week”. Some of the activities I assigned, like CALI lessons or even a typing improvement test, were things that generated their own score at the culmination. Others were self assessments that I mostly had to review. In fact, by adopting a pass/fail completion approach, I didn’t have to focus on any of the math that grading normally requires. The learning management system handled the score recording and I could focus on individualized feedback as often as I was able.

More importantly, though, is to spell out the purpose of it. That purpose is to create enough available points that the final exam doesn’t have to be determinative of the final grade. That, while I expect them to do the work and improve (in the case of the bar exam, for their own benefit, if not for the class grade), the final exam isn’t really the goal. The skill development is the goal. And because the participation is designed around being (a) attainable, (b) measurable, and (c) relevant, it should reinforce that skill building.

I think that, if that message is shared early and often, and they see that their effort is accruing points towards their final grade, the final exam will diminish in importance. It is still a final measure, for them and for me, as to how well they have achieved the learning objectives. But it needn’t dwarf the other work they’ve done during the semester nor should it be a high-stakes, one-time method of getting the final grade.

I’m looking forward to the chance of testing this out more (and will keep looking for that article). I know this isn’t the way law school is typically taught but that doesn’t seem to be a reason not to try to teach it differently. I’m starting to think that having a bit of a management background is going to help me when I think of how I help students get to their end goal, the same as I would with my staff.