December 14, 2006

There is no such thing as an easy exam, either.

All exams are equally difficult, and any variations in grade between students, or between classes for a particular student, is a combination of variations in intelligence, expectations, and random chance. Here's why:

If I think an exam is going to be extremely difficult, then I get apprehensive about it. The amount of studying I do for it is inversely related to my level of apprehension. For instance, five days ago I was very worried about my Evidence exam, since I've done nothing in that class since September. So I buckled down and studied hard, which I so rarely do, and was, to the amazement of myself and those around me, extremely productive. In fact, I was so productive, and covered so much material, that I was no longer worried about it as of two days ago, and could no longer convince myself that I needed to be productive. So, I've done absolutely nothing since then. Which brings us to tonight, the night before my Patent Law exam, still having been unable to do anything for that class, because I am not too worried about it. I did all the reading for it, and mostly paid attention to Professor Thomas in class (who is awesome, by the way), so it just never loomed ominous the way that Evidence did. A lack of looming ominous means a lack of me fleeing to the books.

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And so it is that I am equally prepared for all of my exams, and in general, they are all equally difficult for me during the actual exam. One might ask why, then, I get a different grade on every exam. Well, I have a further theory that there is zero correlation between effort/knowledge on law school topics and grades on law school exams. I literally think that a student's grades have nothing to do with how much that student prepares. The only exceptions are at the very top of the class (solid A grades always know their shit and have worked very, very hard), and the very bottom of the class (C grades have to know extremely little, and are either not extraordinarily intelligent in the type of thinking required for the class, or else did next to nothing throughout the semester--or both). But for everyone in the middle range (say, 80% of the class), the preparation has nothing to do with the normative performance.

That isn't to say that a particular student can't study very hard and go from a B to an A-. It definitely can happen. But between one generic student who has studied very hard and another generic student who has not, it is almost just as likely that the latter student will score higher than the former. This is, I think, still true even if the two students are of identical intelligence, though slightly less so. But since it is impossible to determine one's intellectual standing relative to one's classmates, such a slight difference cannot rationally motivate one's behavior.

What that means is that law school exams do a very poor job of testing students' skills and knowledge. I don't think that law school exams are written poorly, or that the culture of law school exams is necessarily flawed. But I do think that the types of skills on which we are being tested are inherently untestable except over a very large period of time and in a large variety of situations. Exams can't hope to create a large enough sample to measure our actual skills and knowledge, and so they are very prone to random sampling errors. We happened not to know much about the Huddleston standard, and yet that's what the Professor asked about. On the other hand, we were expert in the Hilmer rule, but that wasn't on the exam. Or we wrote an exam that was equally analytically sound as another student, but the Professor was psychologically biased against us because we made a typo and wrote, "inabmissible," while the other student did not. Or the outline we used didn't include a citation to 35 U.S.C. § 105, instead referring to it by the section's title, "Inventions In Outer Space," so we didn't find it when we used Ctrl-F. There are infinitely many ways in which one can randomly be screwed over by one's exams.

So the obvious conclusion is that one should study a very little bit, but not much. One should seek only to avoid the Cs, and then, if I'm right (and I'm almost definitely not) one's grades will be distributed randomly around the average, which is somewhere between B and B+. Just don't sweat the outliers.

Posted at December 14, 2006 9:34 PM | Comments (1)

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