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final_exams
Well, that was a weird little exam. Not quite what we were told to expect, structurally. Just... odd.
I have one final next semester. So, this was the penultimate.
These are the instructions for downloading and installing the software needed to take your fall semester final examinations using your laptop computer.
Requirements: PC computer running MicroSoft Windows XP or Vista, or an Apple Macintosh. An active USF wireless account.
Finally, in the first semester of my fourth year, I get to take my only final exam on a Macintosh. If I get my desired schedule for next semester, I won't have any finals to take.
So, while I'm happy they made this move, sooner would have been nice.
With the IP Survey final completed last night -- a three-hour horse race that can only rival first-year Torts I -- I have three years in the bag. One more to go.
You felt pretty good about what you were preparing as the answer, and you felt pretty good as you wrote it. However, once you've turned in the exam, you're obsessed with all of the things you stated poorly or could have better explained or addressed.
I'm in the middle of a 24-hour take home final right now. I'm pretty sure this is not the format I prefer. Too much time for my mind to wander.
One more final on Thursday.
I'm mostly posting right now because it was suggested that I not.
Prof. Hoffman responded to my previous post. One of his commenters takes issue with the "fun stories" lead. I don't. In the big picture, these events aren't going to matter much at all. I've even gotten to the point where I laugh when telling the story of my Contracts II exam day meltdown (sort of a "What are these contract things of which you speak?" thing.)
Concurring Opinions: Reviewing Grading: Part II:
Fun stories, but I think that the number of downward corrections following exam review is exceedingly small, especially when considered as a proportion of the number of possible corrections. The social pressures against professors issuing such rulings are extreme (telling someone that they got a C face-to-face, after they were endowed with an original B, is much harder than giving them a C in the first place). Moreover, the procedural niceties are significantly more likely to be challenged in the case of a downward departure than an upward one, because the student will be kicking and screaming the whole way through the process. Therefore, we would predict that most times a professor spots the possibility of an error in the “curve’s favor” (instead of the student’s) he or she will simply ignore it. This is a windfall for the reviewed student, at the expense of the class.
To be sure, I didn't mean to suggest that grade lowering post-review is commonplace. Nor did I even intend to suggest it's the norm for when misreported grades are found. The school does make it very difficult for professors to change grades; at least, that's what professors and the student handbook tell us. Seeing as the Academic Standards Committee that makes the decisions is comprised of fellow professors, I do wonder how difficult it truly is. Basically, regrading of an exam will not happen at USF. Corrections for mathematical and reporting errors may occur if approved by the committee. (If I had the student handbook handy -- say, if the school would provide it in a digital form -- I would quote letter and verse.)
In my nearly 5.5 semesters here, I personally know of only one student who has had a grade lowered. I personally know of only one student who has had a grade raised. It just so happens that it was the same student in the same semester. And it was our first semester. As a result, those things have stuck with me, and I may well blow things out of proportion as a result.
I'd definitely recommend for those who wonder about their grades or wonder what they could have possibly done wrong to go and find out. I haven't done it often, not so much because of the one instance of grade lowering -- though that did keep me from seeing that prof that semester, and my worst grade in law school came from him the following semester in Contracts II -- but largely because it's been easy to figure out what I did right or wrong. I don't have many grades down the middle.
Prof. Dave Hoffman of Temple wonders about the different exam review cultures.
Concurring Opinions: Exam Review Culture:
The basic story would go like this. At some schools - including the one where I teach - there is a strong culture of encouraging students to come to professors' offices after receiving grades to review the exam and find ways to improve their performance. To my mind, this is a very good thing - not just for students, who can be taught to do better on an economically consequential activity - but for professors, who can figure out exactly how badly written exams confuse test-takers. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of my fall semester class came in to meet with me over the last two weeks (at a half-hour a meeting). But, looking back at where I went to law school, I can't remember ever going to talk to a professor about my exams, nor any of my friends doing so either. Casual inquiry among conference participants suggests that a culture of encouraging colleagues to undertake individualized exam review is more common at schools outside of the traditional top tier.Why? It surely isn't because students at top-tier schools lack incentives to get to know professors. And, I doubt it is because professors at elite institutions don't care about teaching. Nor, in the end, is it because exam review isn’t helpful, or because grades don’t matter at schools without a culture of review.
At USF, it certainly seems to be commonplace. I've never actually done it myself. I've picked up my exams on occasion. Ironically, only the good ones, to see just how good. There's always a lingering sense of embarrassment for me to go see a professor about a bad exam. (And yet, I'll happily talk to Prof. Osborn, who happens to have given 2 of my 3 worst exams, about just about anything but Contracts.) To some degree, I can put poor performance on procrastination, bad exam day, etc., and I just leave it at that. At this stage of the game, I'm not sure how much I'd gain from reviewing exams, anyway.
And then there's the one other bit. My friend who went to review his exam, only to have the professor discover it had been misrecorded to the benefit of the student. And the professor's next move? Why, of course, he lowered the student's grade. And it never would have happened had the student not gone to review his exam with the professor. I immediately knew I wouldn't be going to review my exam with that prof, and I think that was always in the back of my mind when I considered doing it other times.
One other point. The same student who had the grade lowered after the one exam was reviewed had a miscalculation appear on another exam in the same semester for a full grade bump! That was back in first-year. It made it very easy to become jaded about exam grading right away.
Slow-typing alum sues law school - Campus Life:
An alum is suing the University Law School because he believes its grading policies discriminate against slow typists.Adrian Zachariasewycz claims the Law School's grading policy is unfair to slow typists because students who can type more words per minute can write more during timed exams.
Zachariasewycz filed the complaint in a Delaware court in November.
"It's an incredibly obvious claim," he said.
In the complaint, Zachariasewycz says the exams are more of a test of typing skills than understanding of the material.
...
Zachariasewycz said his handwritten papers and multiple-choice exams were an accurate reflection of his grade - but that his typed exams lowered his grade point average significantly.
Because of his poor grades, he is unable to find a job in the legal field, he said.
"It was wrecking my life - it still is," he said.
He claims he was not aware of the cause of his poor performance on these exams until after graduation, when was unable to find a job.
While Zachariasewycz admits that he has not compared his grades with other law students, he said he is confident that the same discrepancy between typed exams and handwritten papers will also be seen in other students' grades.
The suit says that the school failed to notify him that a minimum typing speed was necessary for success, and that they did not compensate for anyone who might be deficient in this area.
So, law student gets poor grades. Law student can't get job. Law student, after-the-fact, decides to sue for some bizarre rationale. What exactly was he doing during his three years of law school to figure out why his grades were so bad? Could he really not get his head around this typing thing possibly having an impact?
Of course, I disagree that typing speed is an inherent advantage. I type fairly quickly, 100-110 WPM on my PowerBook, and around 85 WPM on my ego keboard (see here, here, or here.) I may be faster on the Kinesis now; I haven't taking a typing test in a long time, and in the nearly three years I've been using the Kinesis at work and at home, I've gotten pretty used to it.
Has fast typing saved me? No. Two of my 3 lowest grades in law school came on typed exams with no multiple choice or otherwise handwritten component. In spite of my regular rants about hating multiple choice components in exams, I don't believe I've ever gotten lower than an A- on a timed exam that had a multiple choice component. On the other hand, I have received grades lower than A- on exams that were strictly essay exams or otherwise typed-answer exams, despite the fact that I type faster than the vast majority of my classmates. Finally, I know lots of folks who have done better than I who are slower typists.
Of course, none of this should be news to someone who went to law school. It's not always the amount of content you can get into an exam that is important; it's getting what the professors want to see into the exam that is important. I can spew and spew and spew, and it won't benefit me one bit if it's not something the professor has deemed worthy of points. Hit the high points while going more slowly, and it would be easy and very doable to do better.
Patent Law grade came today. It's a satisfactory grade (my sister Emily will say my expectations/stanndards are too high.) On the plus side, my GPA climbed just a touch bit higher, which should keep me in the top 15%. On the downside, it didn't climb enough to bump me into the top 10% or to comfortably keep me in the top 15% at the end of 2008.
One issue with this exam, of course, is that it was a week-long take-home. I got a little complacent and did little to no prep before getting it. That meant that while I put a huge amount of time into it, it was pretty inefficient time, because I was reviewing the material at the same time. That's certainly a pattern I will have to avoid in the future.
The other problem, of course, is that I was doing that on a shortened schedule. I had to pick up the exam on Wednesday, December 6. My Evidence exam was on Saturday, December 9. I didn't start looking at Patent Law until around 5 PM on December 9, with the exam to be turned in on December 13. I didn't start working on it in earnest until after I got moving on Sunday, December 10, after my Evidence final hangover. In short, I didn't play it well. I think I'll accept the grade.
Pass and move on, as Stan likes to say.
I think the worst thing about law school is the grueling post-exam wait. Among other things, you go through your days thinking about the issues you failed to address in your exams. For instance, in the last couple of days, it's dawned on me that I completely forgot to address the issue of evidence authentication in the essay portion of my Evidence final. I remember noting the issue as I was preparing the problem; I can't remember the precise facts to know whether or not there was sufficient self-identification in the 911 call.
Last semester, it was whether or not I was right about the outcome of the civilian rape trial in Crim Pro.
Hopefully, I'll put it out of my mind over the next several weeks, but I'm not counting on it.
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