On A Scale Of 1 To 10, How Irresponsible Is This Law School Professor?

A complex question about exam propriety.

Every year there’s another story about a law school professor recycling an exam question and being absolutely shocked that some part of the class had advanced knowledge of the question and tries to backtrack with some hamfisted solution that never really cures the problem. And yes, that was a cured ham pun.

But we got a tip about a new exam debacle and, honestly, it’s not really clear if this a professorial backfire or perfectly acceptable. Here’s an edited account of the situation and then you can decide:

It was this professor’s first time teaching con law…. Throughout the semester he expressed his lack of familiarity with writing exam questions for the class, so he frequently gave us practice exam questions that he wrote up, sometimes with answers that he also wrote. For all of them, he allowed students to come to office hours to discuss their answer to the hypotheticals and get feedback on what they wrote.

When the final exam rolled around… [t]his professor reused questions he had given us during the semester for some of the essay questions in what was an open book exam. In effect, this professor gave students the opportunity to check their final exam answers with him and correct them before going to take the final.

On the one hand, some students got to know exactly what to expect of the questions in advance. On the other hand, these were practice exams given to everyone in the current class so no one was at a disadvantage to a handful of students who dug up a rare copy of a decade-old exam in the law review office archives. But, without telling the class that these questions could end up on the exam, no doubt most students breezed over them — if they looked at them at all — and certainly only the gunnerest of gunners went to office hours to engage in lengthy theoretical discussions over a practice example. However, a lot of being a lawyer comes down to being prepared and even if the professor didn’t lift the questions completely, doing the practice tests would have been valuable preparation for getting inside the professor’s head.

This is a tough one. So I’ll ask you: how irresponsible was this move on a scale of 1 (Learned Hand) to 10 (Rudy Giuliani):

How Irresponsible Was This?

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Earlier: A Note For Law School Professors That We Regrettably Have To Repeat: There Is Never A Good Remedy To Reusing An Exam Question


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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