My business law professor's tests

The BBQ Pit
1

Alright I’m new here (a bit about me for those interested )

but man do I have something to pit from earlier today, and maybe a bit to learn from anyone from who is or was a teacher who can tell me a bit more about the test-making process.

But my business law teacher absolutely infuriated me earlier today with his method of testing.
Now, I saw a bit of this coming when I went in to the test from looking at his “sample questions” but the sheer lunacy of this stuff was incredible.

some basics here

  1. the test was open BOOK but not open note, which makes some questions by default silly to ask because they merely task me with opening the book to the correct page and some hopelessly difficult because they require me to recall minute details from lectures.

  2. One of his questions involved a question that had two different factual answers in the two different books (both of which he wrote), what made it more fun was that this was a true/false. If you looked it up in the wrong book… well…

  3. His multiple choice questions are deliberately vague, and although he claims “he won’t try to mislead you” and “you should only use the information in the problem” in some cases 2 or more answers can be factually or at least very reasonably correct. The best example of this

Party 1 files a complaint against party 2 for a property damage. Later, a specific repair bill is recieved and party 1 files to change the factual nature of the complaint.

Knowing that this, in fact, a legal move, I’m left with 2 choices

  1. The change is legal, but will place the party at significant disadvantage because the factual nature of the change
  2. The change is legal, pre-trial proceedings will continue.

Now, the book specifically states that #1 is “often” true, since it reduces credibility. BUT since we aren’t supposed to infer anything, we have no way to know if those changes ARE significant and IF they will really impact the outcome. If I had been taking a normal test, my knowledge of the subject area and the intention of the question would almost certainly be choice 1 since that’s the emphasis in the book. But because I know he plays mind games, the SAFEST choice has to be 2. But an UNDERSTANDING of the subject (instead of reading the question with blinders on) will lead to choice 1 because that’s the thrust of the lesson.

Finally, he has an appeals process, which can only be done DURING the exam period (2 hours, 90%+ of the test takers finish as time is being called or are in fact not yet finished).
Now, this leads me to think of 2 possible scenarios, and I’m not sure which one is worse

  1. he expects us to appeal so he can out-technicality us (red-fire-truck distinctions he calls them, as opposed to yellow-fire-trucks) and laugh as he flexes his years as a trial lawyer
  2. he expects only the students like me to appeal, and in fact WANTS that to happen so he can give ONLY those students good grades for calling him on his bullshit. Unfortunately, this penalizes a vast majority of the students who are just as aware of his bullshit but don’t have time to appeal his questions.
2

Truth: the law doesn’t lend itself to multiple choice questions. Sure, you can do it - but they’re either really easy or really hard. Easy? Elements of law; testing definitions; no-brainer applications. Hard: testing a subrule of a subrule of a subrule, and, most often, multiple “correct” answers where you have to pick the most correct. I hate those. The law is meant to be tested in essay form - argue both sides, make a reasonable conclusion, move on with your life.

That said, sounds like your professor is using a standard “law school” type multiple choice exam. Vague multiple choice questions with multiple correct answers - some “righter” than others. That irritating testing pattern continues on from law school to the Multistate Bar exam.

My point being - I feel for you, but if you’re interested in law school, your B Law professor just gave you a nasty little amuse bouche.

3

that’s the thing though, this law course is required for ALL business school students. I don’t really HAVE an interest in going to law school, and neither do probably 80%+ of the students of the course. Sure, I guess I can understand that… but geez, couldn’t he find a different way of doing it for the general business course?

4

Possibly, but this way you business graduates are also getting prepared for the size of your legal bills a few years down the line. :stuck_out_tongue:

5

Well, I don’t know about your business law teacher, but I can tell you a bit of the perspective of the business law teacher I’ve been married to for 20+ years.

As far as multiple choice tests, she went to them several years back after many years of trying to decipher unitelligible essays - spending hours trying to figure out what the writer was trying to say, and then trying to figure out what - if any - credit to give to folks who completely missed the boat.

Regarding “tricky” questions, well, my wife has no interest in “outsmarting” a bunch of college kids. Just last test one kid argued that she was using confusing language on her tests. The word to which he objected? “Erroneously. What does THAT mean?” To my wife’s credit she responded, “In error, as ‘You answered that question erroneously.’”

After 1/2 of her class failed her most recent test - 50 minutes, open note, she asked me if I’d take it. Yes, I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years, but I do not practice commercial law and law school was decades ago. The test took me 10 minutes and I missed 1 question. There was nothing approaching a tricky question or ambiguous wording on the test.

I am sure that you are a fine student who is attending class regularly and doing the assignments. Every semester my wife has at least one or two students who seem interested in learning the material, and have some intellectual capability to do so. And I’m, sure your school and its students are several steps above the community college where Ms. D teaches. But I am amazed at the number of students my wife regularly encounters who exhibit neither the interest nor the ability to master the material.

If you can make a good argument about why a particular question is ambiguous, she may give you credit for it. But not simply if you wish to argue. I’m not sure why you have a problem with that. Of course, if a student convinces my wife that a question is badly written, or a second answer is acceptable, she will either throw out that question or give credit to everyone who chose the second answer - not just the person who raised the objection.

Of course, it is possible your teacher is an incompetent asshole. I’ve heard that there may actually be one or two lawyers like that. :wink:

It’s not easy material, and it requires some work, and you may not great at it. But neither is life. Suck it up, get the best grade you can, and then do your best to insulate yourself from ever having to deal with it again.

6

Yeah, but testing in essay form requires that the teacher actually read the essays, assess the argument, offer constructive criticism, and assign a grade.

See my comment above.

I was under the impression that doing this stuff was part of the job of a college teacher. I could i guess, set my American History students multiple choice questions asking about dates and people and events, and then tick off the right answers, but that would be doing a disservice to people who pay good money for an education.

I understand that some teachers have to cope with extremely large classes, and that in such cases grading essays would be not only impractical, but virtually impossible. But essays shouldn’t be abandoned just because they require a bit of effort to grade. As for what to do with students who miss the boat? Give them a C- or a D if their paper has some redeeming features; if not, give them an F. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that.

7

Wow, you really don’t want to crack open the property and contracts section of the MBEs if you think law school multiple choice tests are tough. I’ve taken 2 diff bar exams and been suckered into taking the MBEs every time (I’ve passed the MBE portion every time) and frankly, I just write off entire sections of contracts and the future interests on property because the questions are so crazy. I also used the “write-off” tactic in law school and have very few grades below B+.

Also, I always felt open book/open note was a bit of a sham and timesuck. I memorised or had a very good working knowledge of my outline whether or not it was an option.

8

I agree with your entire post, but I think the OP is talking about an undergrad Business Law course.

9

I’m not sure I agree with you. Of course it is possible you are just a far better and more dedicated (and less burned out) instructor than my wife. But I’m not sure why the assigning of essay tests is necessarily a required element of effectively teaching American History - or Business Law. Don’t you have enough material to cover without adding in basic English composition? Especially if your college-aged students haven’t learned basic grammar and compositional structure by their age.

My wife tried many different things over many years, and found that she obtains essentially the same grade curve whether she gives multiple choice or essay tests. So why do you believe essay tests are necessary in order to effectively communicate your subject material? If you effectively communicate your subject material, why would your manner of testing constitute a disservice to your students?

I also believe not all multiple choice - or essay - tests are created equal. I could easily imagine a scenario in which a well-constructed multiple choice test was far superior than a poorly written and graded essay test.

And, a not inconsequential factor concerns your school’s expectations. My wife’s school does not have a preference, and is fine with multiple choice. Several years in my wife was surprised to find she was the only teacher giving essay tests. There was no financial incentive to expend the extra effort to write and grade essays instead of running answer sheets through the scantron. And when she polled her students, they overwhelmingly preferred multiple choice.

10

Better? I’m not in a position to say. I doubt it, though.

Less burned out? Perhaps. I don’t consider myself burned out at all. I don’t have a full-time job because i’m still finishing my dissertation. I teach one class per semester to help pay the bills, and to add to my CV. I appreciate that my teaching load is less than most professors, although my overall workload is not, as i have to do my own research and writing when i’m not teaching.

Well, first of all, if they haven’t yet learned basic grammar and compositional structure by the time they get to college, then they’d better damn well pick it up quickly. And, to tell you the truth, i see no problem with helping them to develop these skills by setting essays. Sure, i’m a history teacher, but part of my job is also to prepare these students to be communicators in whatever profession they choose. When i grade their papers, i offer comments not only on their historical analysis and argument, but on the clarity of their writing and the correctness of their grammar.

Now, you might argue that a law professor’s sole task is to teach her students about the law, and i’ve heard such arguments made before. But i think that’s a cop-out. Presumably, those studying law will not, in their future careers, be able to practice by filling in multiple choice questions. They will have to write briefs, arguments, analyses for clients, etc., and developing skills that help them do this is part of a law professor’s job, IMO.

Also, on the specific issue of the type of tests, my main aim in teaching history is not to get them to “remember stuff.” If they forget the specific year of the Stamp Act or the Louisiana Purchase, i don’t care very much. They can always look it up. The rote memory of details is less important to me (and, i think, to most history teachers) than the ability to analyze an issue and develop an argument about it. If a person writes an excellent paper on the significance of the Louisiana Purchase for American social and political development in the nineteenth century, and gets a few details wrongs, they’ll still get a good grade. And the sort of historical understanding that they display in such a paper just cannot, in my experience, be demonstrated in a multiple choice test.

Now, it may be that law is more conducive than history to the type of knowledge that can be demonstrated in a multiple choice test. I 've never studied law, so i don’t know. I fully appreciate that not every discipline models itself on history, and nor should it. But there are some in this thread, like Doctor Who, who think that law stuff also needs to be tested by essays.

The fact that your wife gave essay tests for so long suggests that she herself feels that they had a certain value. And, from your own explanation, it seems that she’s given up on essays more out of expediency than out of any real notion of improving the learning experience of the students. I’m not sure what it signifies that she gets a similar grade curve with essay tests and multiple choice tests; even if the curve is the same, for a given class different students might do better on different types of test. A student who gets A’s on an essay might get C’s on a multiple choice test, and vice versa. The question shouldn’t be about what the curve looks like, but whether the test itself is a good way of examining the knowledge and skills that the class is meant to impart.

As i said, it may be that multiple choice tests are appropriate in a law class, but that determination should not be made based on how difficult they are to grade.

I’m sure that’s right. I’m assuming that we are talking about classes that have equally competent teachers, capable of writing decent tests.

Again, the argument from expediency. I’m not saying it’s wrong or even irrelevant; all professors have to find ways to balance the various demands of their jobs—teaching, research, writing, service/admin, etc. As long as we don’t confuse the question of expediency with the question of sound pedagogy.

As for the students preferring multiple choice: well, duh! :slight_smile:

I should also add, by the way, that i know quite a few history teachers who do give multiple choice and short answer tests. In most cases, those professors work in large state colleges where they have massive numbers of students and no TA’s. One professor just can’t grade essays from 150 students. But almost all of my friends who use such tests concede that they are less than ideal, and that essays would be better if the resources were available to grade them.

11

:: hijack:: I often thought this was a silly restriction, though it was a common one in my law school exams (particularly code based classes like Bankruptcy and Federal Income Tax). Who doesn’t write notes in his or her book? So how many notes are ok? I have these empty pages at the front and back, with the font choices and printer technology out their, I could easily reduce and apply my entire outline to the fly pages. This was invariably met by the professors with an “I’ll know a violation when I see it” sort of response – nice lesson for law school, there is no certainty. It was only second in stupidity to, “you can bring in an outline, but not someone else’s outline.” If I get someone else’s outline on disk and incorporate parts of it in mine, is that ok? What if I supplement the whole thing? What about study groups that collaborate on outlines? It never ceased to amaze me how some very bright law professors couldn’t foresee enforcement and interpretation problems with their own exam “laws” ::hijack::

BTW, I went to UF too. Go Gators.

12

Go gators indeed, and I think at this point hijacking the thread is a minor issue considering the debate is now over the nature of essay vs. MC tests but hey. On your note, yeah our law teacher went out of his way to say the same stuff, only even sillier. “You can write notes in the book, but only your own notes” I got a used book that already had the inside covers covered in writing, am i penalized for that? on what basis? do you seriously expect me to go through the book and erase everything they’ve written? what does that even prove? how do you prove notes in a book AREN’T the book owner’s notes? do you care, I mean, you given them the book as a reference anyways…

yeah that last part is exactly what I’m pitting… I’ll throw some more examples out when he posts the answer guide.

As to essay vs. MC, I think logistically, a couple thousand people taking a test is simply impossible to give as an essay and grade fairly within a reasonable time frame.

13

Without a doubt. I didn’t realize your class was that big.

14

I clearly understand and respect your position, mhendo. But, as I said in my previous post, I’m still not sure I agree with you.

15

Having taught business law to business students, I am of the opinion that all business law exam questions should only have one correct answer: “Do not do anything and call your lawyer immediately.” :wink:

16

:smiley: that’s some solid advice

17

As one of my professors, who didn’t give a rat’s ass what you brought into the exam with you, once said: “At no time in the real world will anyone ever tell you, ‘all of the answers you need are right here in this big book, but you’re not allowed to look at it.’”

18

Ok THAT I think you could test fairly with multiple choice. :stuck_out_tongue:

19

hides from thread, dives back into barbri books

grumble, grumble, fucking bar…

20

Now if only I could convince my business college to follow that piece of advice…

I love law, but I am not looking forward to that class next semester.