Thanks for sharing this (and congrats again!). My thoughts:

1. "give students advice about taking exams" - we should ask this to be upfront and written, so that students can know at the outset what the professor intends them to get out of the course and how they intend to assess whether we did or not, as well as hold them accountable.

2. "enact a requirement that faculty in all semesters give feedback on exams" - what feedback? Just on our performance or also on the exam itself (i.e. median/mean scores, SVs, performance by demographic, etc)? We should ask that this information be uploaded to a universally accessible location on lawnet so that future generations can see the feedback from previous years. We should also ask that the professor provide feedback on a mock exam prior to the students' actual exam (some professors may already have examples of this they can provide, others will have to make new ones) - ideally it would be good to see feedback on high/medium/low performing exams, but at least one would be a start.

3. I would affirm he is in the right path with emphasizing legal writing but also suggest he could do a lot more - there are many other forms of legal writing students should have a chance to explore. LPW doesn't have to become a Fred Rodell style course but it could and should be more diverse and creative than the narrow memo-->brief world.

Jared - Dean Schizer responded to the e-mail that I sent on June 27th today. He definitely seems concerned and willing to implement innovative strategies to improve education at Columbia Law School. His response to my e-mail is below. Looks like we are moving in the right direction. I'm glad we spoke up.

I'm really sorry I haven't got back to you earlier - I wanted to wait until I had something substantive to say but at this point I'm still in the research phase and don't really have a cohesive view worth sharing. That said, This project is partially a long-term endeavor for me and will likely take a far greater scope than can realistically be expected to apply to any meaningful change in the law school. I've been thinking about the best way to actually make an impact and at this point am of the view that advocating for reform of a few specific policies while trying to promote broader campus awareness of alternative visions is probably going to be more effective than presenting a complete break from the status quo and arguing for its superiority. Dean Schizer's apparent willingness to consider midterms is a good sign, and it's possible that we will have better luck splitting the two activities so that we can remain polite and on good terms when advocating incremental change while simultaneously pushing for radical change with sufficient force to generate some actual resistance. To that extent, I think the best path going forward is for us to collectively try and compile a list (perhaps on a new thread for clarity) of realistically achievable changes we would like to see, in order to then triage based on importance/feasibility and distill down to 1-3 policies to lobby for over the upcoming year. I will try to devote more attention to this while continuing to research big-picture ideas, but in the meantime we can start with suggestions already expressed by others above.

Here are some proposals that I have been toying with. I may modify or replace them with better ideas as time progresses/we all discuss further.

1. Requiring an upfront, explicit written description of grading policy and exam format (if there must be an exam) at the beginning of class (so that we don't have a confusing discussion in class in the final weeks).

2. Requiring a clear and instructive list of expected outcomes for any assessment, including an exam, to be provided beforehand.

3. Requiring some form of diagnostic/formative assessment prior to the final summative exam.

4. Explicit acknowledgment in early student welcome materials of unorthodox learning opportunities/pathways - i.e. Rules 3.1.2 and 1.5.1.1.

5. A commitment to conduct and report to students meaningful data analysis of macro-level grades - i.e. Are there any observable patterns in individual grades or grade trends between men and women, minority and non-minority candidates, students from different undergraduate majors, etc? What is the distribution of different grades for the same course via different professors?

6. Improvement of exam feedback tools and commitment to provide support for teachers to use these tools - i.e. sample answers at different bands (not just a single "model answer" but also "this is what a B+, B and B- answer looks like"), publishing of marking guidelines for exams (when they are used), and an official digital repository on lawnet so that students can directly compare the use of these tools by different professors.

7. Expansion of the relative credit value of the LPW class vis-a-vis doctrinal classes (thereby reducing the GPA weighting of 1L classes overall) - I need to check the ABA rules about this though.

Rohan

-- JaredMiller - 29 Jun 2012

-- WilliamDavidWilliams - 29 Jun 2012