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65 UMKC L. Rev. 657 (1996-1997)
An Informal History of How Law Schools Evaluate Students, with a Predictable Emphasis on Law School Final Exams

handle is hein.journals/umkc65 and id is 667 raw text is: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF HOW LAW SCHOOLS EVALUATE STUDENTS, WITH A PREDICTABLE EMPHASIS ON LAW SCHOOL FINAL EXAMS Steve Sheppard* Final exams play on a law student 's world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they're at a distance, they serve merely to create the tensions which swell daily like tides - to read to keep pace, to understand As exams draw close, however,... their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces.' American law schools currently employ one essential, formal method of student evaluation - course-end examinations.2 While informal evaluation, particularly observation of student oral class performances, does occur, the exams are usually the exclusive method by which a record of student performance is created. Examinations serve to measure the ability of the student to use the material assigned, whether they are fit or unfit for the practice of law, or for the recognition by the school that sufficient skill is had to award a law degree,3 whether they should be recognized and identified for the employers as outstandingly fit,4 and to signal the strengths and weaknesses of a student's work for the student's future development, as an incentive both to learn as much as possible during instruction and to review that instruction later.5 The exams of the many American schools now follow a surprisingly few patterns based on a few hypothetical questions and, less often, on a group of many multiple-choice questions. This pattern - of hypothetical essay examinations being the sole record of the students' performance - is a recent stage in the evolution ofU.S. legal education. Once exams were only one form of evaluation to judge fitness, used in conjunction with class recitations, notebook inspections, and moot court performance. This complicated *. Associate Professor, Thomas M. Cooley Law School. I thank the editors of the UMKC Law Review for their invitation to write this article; without their exhibition of blind faith in agreeing to publish the unwritten, it would have remained so. I am also grateful to the Thomas Cooley librarians, particularly Sharon Bradley, Ardena Walsh, and Steve Boudette in locating some of the more obscure material for this odyssey, to Kristin Keck, Jill Pullum, and Cindy Hurst for their typing assistance. Frank Lorenz of Hamilton College, Kent McKeever and Whitney Bagnall of Columbia, and David Warrington and David DiLorenzo of Harvard were particularly helpful in locating some of the more critical bits of academic flotsam on which this paper is based. 1. ScoTT TuRow, ONEL 157 (1986). 2. This near-uniformity of method is no accident The American Bar Association demands it of schools that would remain accredited. Standard 304 requires the scholastic achievement of all students in lecture-hall courses to be tested with a written examination of suitable length and complexity. ABA Standard 304(b) (1996). 3. These goals for examinations and their resultant grades are well established. See, e.g., Karl N. Llewellyn, Lawyer's Ways and Means, and the Law Curriculum, 30 IOWA L. REV. 333 (1945). 4. Again, these goals are old hat. See, e.g., John L. Grant, The Single Standard in Grading, 29 COLUM. L. REv. 920 (1929). 5. These goals are, unsurprisingly, less often noted in the literature of this century.

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