It feels like every year we have a professor decide to reuse an old exam setting off a firestorm when students realize that some of the class had prior access to the exam — and sometimes the grading rubric — and others didn’t. The school gets involved and crafts a solution that pleases pretty much nobody while gunners complain that they shouldn’t be punished for having dug up every exam the professor’s ever given. And frankly they’ve got a point. If being a lawyer is about doggedly researching every angle to get the best result then it’s hard to say they did anything wrong — it’s not like they knew the exam they looked at would be copied. Consider this “practice ready” education.
But something has to be done for those who couldn’t get access to the old exam and that’s where there is — and we repeat this all the time — never a good remedy to reusing an exam question.
This year, the short straw was drawn by Cornell Law School where Professor Winnie Taylor reused a contracts exam essay question. To her credit, she *thought* she was in the clear because she had given the previous exam at her old stomping grounds of Brooklyn Law School and didn’t think anyone would dig those up.
Someone dug those up:
Professor Winnie Taylor’s contracts class exam essay was verbatim borrowed from her Brooklyn Law contracts class. Select international students obtained said exam prior to its administration. Upon complaint to the law school by the entire class, Dean of Students Markeisha Miner issued an unclear statement as to what part of the exam would be struck, citing the wrong portion of the test that wasn’t even at issue. The writing portion of the exam was worth 50% of the total class grade, thus leaving a poorly-written multiple-choice section constituting the entire four credit contracts grade. Students are extremely upset and the school refuses to address the issue of fairness considering students who previously obtained the exam had extra time to flush out the remaining parts of the exam.
Note, it was also supposedly Cornell Law School the last time this happened, though some tipsters disputed the original intel. If that story was correct, you’d think they’d be getting good at dealing with this by now.
In any event, there’s no way to please everyone here which is why it’s so essential to never put the class in this position. Why do professors ever think this will work out? It’s just a profound failure to appreciate the gumption of your gunners. If this is a professor’s first exam ever, a couple of students are still going to find her 1L class notes to dig for clues. The great game of the legal academy is forever professors against gunners in a constant struggle to keep the exam predictable enough to be fair but fresh enough that it’s not rite regurgitation. With the internet giving everyone access to everything, this is harder than ever. But when professors underestimate the students, this is what you get.
Professors probably should write new exams every time out of the fate, but if you HAVE to skimp for some reason, consider trading exams with some other professor. Use your next academic conference to build relationships with folks working out of the same casebook and throw your exams into a mutual google drive or something. Just don’t tell people your plan.
Joe 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.