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10 Law Tchr. 1 (2002-2003)

handle is hein.journals/lawteaer10 and id is 1 raw text is: GONZAGA UNIVERSITY Institute for Law School Teaching Fall 2002 Collaboration on examinations By Douglas R. Haddock During the past 15 years, in almost all of my exams, I have used a simple process designed to make examinations a learning experience as well as a means of evaluating performance. About two weeks before classes end, I distribute to students a document titled Information on Facts and Law. I present a story that involves a fair amount of detail with the potential for numerous legal questions and disputes relevant to the subject matter of the course. The document also contains a variety of statements about the law and usually includes a number of pertinent statutes. I inform students that most of the examination problems will be based on the facts and legal doctrine presented. I encourage students to study the document in preparation for the exam and to ponder what legal questions and problems might arise. Students take this advice seriously and often become engaged in the process, preparing for real examination problems in a meaningful way. In studying and discussing the material with other members of the class, students create and work through their own problems and thereby gain a better sense of the subjects they have studied. Many students, I believe, find this focused and creative review the most valuable learning experience of the semester, one that takes them far beyond what I can cover in a three-hour examination. In recent years, going a step beyond this focused and creative review, I have given a number of take-home examinations in which students have been allowed to col- laborate. On two occasions, I set no limits on the number of students who were permitted to work together. In other ex- ams, I have limited the size of the groups. In no case have I required students to work with others on the exam, although some colleagues have suggested that I should. Based on student response, I have come to the tentative conclusion that collaborative exams can be effective in helping many students better learn legal theory and doctrine and develop the skills involved in resolving legal problems. I allowed collaboration in the final exams for my first-year Property I and II classes in 2001-2002. In the fall of 2001, however, I divided the exam into two parts, allowing collaboration on only half of the exam. Concerns about Collaboration on Exams The prospect of allowing law students to collaborate on final examinations presents some issues for both the profes- sor and the students. My primary concern is that the process presumably compromises, to some degree, the evaluative function of exams. When groups of individuals are graded on the basis of a collaborative effort, some students' grades will be different from the grades those individuals would have received working alone. This criticism, usually stated in terms of a free-rider problem, is the main one voiced by students. This is a significant concern, and it is one reason I combined collaboration and individual work in my fall semester exam this year. Based on conversations with students after that fall semester exam, however, I am concerned that this might have created an undesirable group dynamic. I would have more reservations if most or all of the students' grades in any given semester were based on collaborative work. In this sense, perhaps I am a free-rider among my colleagues. I don't know whether there is any way to establish empirically the effect of collaboration on grades, but I have gathered some pertinent and interesting information. For the fall semester exam in 2000 I compared the Property grades of each of my students with the grades they received in three other first-year courses. Of 156 students (two sec- tions), I identified 14 examples of potentially significant deviation between the grades students received in Property compared with the grades they received in other courses. The test I used for potentially significant deviation was this: The Property grade in these examples was at least three grade levels lower or higher than any grade the student Continued on page 2 'I moo***

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