Law Schools

Administration Of Law School Final Exam Is Compromised

Mistakes were made, but what is this law school going to do about it?

By Kathryn Rubino on May 13, 2016 12:11 pm

Angry schoolboyFinals suck, man. No other way around it, and that is true in the optimal circumstances. Then there are cases where something goes wrong.

At Pepperdine University School of Law, folks in Professor Harry Caldwell’s criminal law class experienced an exam mishap, and now they’ve got a tough choice on the best way to go forward. Unlike some of the more infamous examples from Above the Law’s back catalogue, this problem was not caused by lazy law professors who can’t be bothered to create new tests each year, but by ordinary, understandable human error — though the end result was a familiar one: the class was administered an old exam that some students had already used as a study aid in preparing for the new exam.

Vice Dean Shelley Ross Saxer explained to ATL just how this issue occurred:

At Pepperdine, professors are encouraged to post old exams to give guidance to current students and give them opportunities to take practice exams and obtain professor feedback. Professor Caldwell, an experienced professor, had several years of exams posted and held office hours to work with students who had taken some of the older exams as practice exams.  As required by our best practices, Professor Caldwell prepared two new essays for his exam.  A cover instruction sheet from the 2012 exam was accessed to be used for the new essay exam, and after the cover sheet for the 2012 exam had been modified to reflect that it was for the 2016 exam, the entire file for the 2012 exam was inadvertently sent to the printer for copying. Thus, the students were administered the 2012 exam, with a 2016 exam cover sheet, which several students (but not all) had looked at and even taken as a practice exam and extensively discussed it with the professor in his office.  Unfortunately, when some students noticed the problem and reported it to the proctor, the proctor told them to continue and did not bring it to the attention of the administration or the professor.

Oof. That’s unfortunate. And also, why exactly do we have proctors administering exams instead of the actual professors? Are they too good to play Candy Crush and troll Facebook for a few hours while making sure no cheating is happening? Do they schedule multiple of the professor’s exams during the same time slot? This is the result when someone with no connection to the semester-long class work is the only authority figure students can talk to mid-exam.

Suffice it to say, mistakes were made. But it looks like the powers that be at Pepperdine have decided to take what they’ve learned from the mishap and create new procedures to be safeguards against a similar issue happening in the future:

Although this is the first time I have seen this particular mistake occur in my 24 years at Pepperdine, we are taking steps to change several of our processes. First, we will require our professors to review in person the printed exam that will be copied for distribution.  Second, we will instruct proctors, through telephones we have in our classrooms, to immediately contact the administration if there is an exam problem reported by students.  The combination of these two errors created an extremely frustrating and stressful situation for our students.

And now students in Professor Caldwell’s class have a choice to make: either let the multiple choice questions (which were not repeats from 2012, only the essay questions got doubled up) stand as their final grade, or take the 2016 exam that the professor intended to give.

Several options were considered by faculty and administrators and it was decided that the affected students would be given a choice of having their final grade determined based upon their performance on the uncompromised one-hour multiple choice portion of the exam, or alternatively taking the 2016 essay questions during special exam administrations at numerous times and places based upon the students’ schedules. Students electing the latter option would have the one-hour multiple choice exam count for 1/3 of their course grade and the essay questions would count for 2/3 of their course grade.

Good luck to those that still have to take the essay portion of the exam. And kudos to Pepperdine Law — it was a crappy situation, and you responded with clear, concise, fair options. That’s all anyone can ask.

(Read Dean Saxer’s letter to students in Professor Caldwell’s class on the next page.)

Earlier: For The Third Year In A Row, Professor Reuses Old Contracts Exam
Stop Reusing Your Old Exams, You LAZY Law School Professors!
Visiting Professor at NYU Makes a Mess of 1L Contracts Exam
At NYU Law, Using The Same Exam Three Times In A Row Is Apparently Not A Problem

Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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