law school grading – Learn Law Better

The rule dump is the number one mistake students make on their law school exams. This is when the student throws out as much information from the course that they can remember, hoping that some of it will stick. Usually the rule dump, also called a brain dump, occurs all on the first page of the essay. Let me explain why professors hate it and why it is hurting your grade.

College Exams

In college, the best grades go to student answers that have lots of information. This is because most college professors test students on knowledge retention. In other words, if you demonstrate that you read the material you get a good grade. That exam writing style will not work in law school.

Law School Exams

While law school essay exams do require you to know the law, that is only the starting point for a well written essay. Law school exams are testing you on higher level thinking skills. In fact, law school professors grade exams by allocating most of the points to those exams that apply the rules to the facts. So here is what law professors think when they see a rule dump. We start asking ourselves, does this student understand the issue or is the student trying to throw everything they know into the answer because the student is confused. For more information on the levels of learning, you may want to look at this article on Bloom’s Taxonomy from Vanderbilt.

Relevance

On a business associations exam testing on vicarious liability, the facts clearly state that Mat is an employee. Some students will then provide a rule dump with all of the rules needed to establish that someone is an employee, like the level of control between principal and agent. But none of that was necessary as the facts provided that Mat is an employee.

That leaves me wondering if the student understands the issue or not. And guess what happens when there is uncertainty? Students receive lower grades. It is possible that the student understood the issue, but because the student employed the brain dump method that student ended up with a lower grade. The learning point here is that you should only provide the rules that are needed to answer the question.

Conflicts

Another problem with the brain dump is that you might provide different rules that appear to conflict with each other. This will also cost you points. For example, suppose that you are writing a negligence essay. There are absolutely no facts provided in the question to indicate that the victims are children. Some students will then discuss the attractive nuisance doctrine. This leaves me wondering if the student understands the question or not.

Hidden Rule

A third problem occurs when the rule that is needed to answer the question is hidden with several superfluous rules. The professor might miss it completely or not appreciate how you wanted that rule applied to the fact pattern.

Keep in mind that law school is a professional school, preparing students to become lawyers and not professors. When you bring your case before a judge, or discuss your case with a partner, that judge or partner only wants to hear about the law relevant to the case—not everything you know about the law. Judges, partners, AND professors are busy people, so only provide the rules you need to answer the question.

Finally, since all exams have some kind of time limit, you are wasting precious time discussing rules that, at best, will be ignored, and at worst, will cost you points.

How to Avoid the Rule Dump

The best way to avoid the rule dump is by using the IRAC Method. This is where you discuss each issue separately: state the Issue, provide the Rule, Analyze the facts, and give your Conclusion. Unfortunately, many students misunderstand how to use the method, so you may want to read my article on Nested IRAC, which explains in detail how use IRAC on a law school essay exam. Before any exam, you need to practice using IRAC. In addition to taking law school exams, incorporate IRAC into your daily class preparation by using the FIRAC Case Briefing Method.

Law school exam grading is one of the least transparent aspects of the law school experience. A student takes an exam and then weeks or months later gets a grade. But a grade without feedback from their professor. They will never discover why they received the grade, and almost certainly no help on improving.

Holistic Grading

The traditional law school exam grading method is holistic grading. This is where the professor reads the exam and assigns a grade based on the professor’s past grading experience. For example, the professor decides that “this exam is an A and the other one is a C.” Thankfully, very few professors grade using this method.

Analytic Grading

The most common form of law school exam grading is analytic grading. The professor creates a grading sheet, where points are assigned for discussing certain issues. For example, on a Torts exam, there may be 1 to 5 points for Breach of Duty. The professor will then decide, after reading each exam, whether the student gets 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 points for Breach of Duty. While this approach is better than pure holistic grading, in practice, most professors are still grading holistically as there are no written criteria for each issue. A true analytic grading sheet, which some professors use, have written criteria in assigning points. For example, a 5 might be given for “rule statements that clearly identified the law and connected the correct facts to the law.”

Feedback

Many law professors don’t provide good feedback for several reasons. First, many are not rewarded by their law schools for teaching. They are not required to meet with their students or help them improve their exam skills. Most law schools reward professors that write scholarly articles that get published in top journals. And for many professors, that means spending time writing and not helping students. A friend of mine was visiting at a top 50 law school and he shared this story with me. His office was next to a faculty member who was always busy writing. This faculty member always kept his door closed and locked, so that he could spend time writing. When students knocked on his door, the students were ignored. Even though the faculty member was inside his office and the students desperately wanted help. This faculty member understood that his top 50 law school rewarded scholarship over teaching. While this story is disturbing, it is all too common at many law schools.

Professors Not Trained in Feedback Techniques

Another reason that professors don’t provide meaningful feedback is because the professor hasn’t spent the time learning how to provide good feedback. For almost every law professor, grading is the least desirable part of the job–who really wants to grade a hundred essays in three weeks. This means that many professors use checklists in assigning grades. For example, a professor grading a 4th Amendment exam might have something like this on her spreadsheet: Police are legally allowed to observe Joe on public street (2 points); Police may stop Joe and ask him a quick question (3 points); Police may pat down Joe for weapons (5 points). And with that checklist, if you are ever allowed to see it, you see that you got 2 points, 2 points, and 3 points.

But that kind of information is almost worthless because you don’t know WHY the professor assigned those points to you. Suppose that you do meet with your professor and you ask her why she gave you 3 points for an issue, you are likely going to get a response like this: “you need to have a stronger rule statement and your analysis could have been stronger.” That is a conclusion that does not really help you for the next exam, and you are likely to continue making the same errors on future exams.

Meaningful Feedback

What every law student needs is meaningful feedback and a plan to improve. From day one I have worked hard at trying to help students improve, but I did a poor job during my first few years of teaching. At first, I would meet with students for about half an hour and go through their exam with them, line by line. That sounds good, but it didn’t work. Then I had shorter meetings and provided students with resources to improve, and that didn’t work either. Over the last few years I came to realize that students don’t improve because they don’t really understand what law school essay exams are really about. Most students believe that an essay exam grade is based on their understanding of the material. That is a profound misunderstanding of the law school essay exam!

Students need more than the law. They also need to use the IRAC Method for organizing their exams. After meeting with many students, especially those that got the lowest grades, I came to realize that they knew the material. If I had given them an oral exam they would have received high grades, not low grades. This taught me that students don’t know HOW to write an answer that makes sense to professors and bar examiners. So once you get your grade, make an appointment with your professor.

Empowering Students

Ideally, feedback should be designed to help students become self-reflective learners. This will allow them to see the patterns embedded in future law school or bar exams. Let me tell you about Henry (not his real name), who was in the first group of students that I worked with using my self-reflection method. Henry got one of the lowest grades on the midterm exam. He was devastated and came to me for help as he did not understand how he could have received this low grade. Rather than telling him what he did wrong, I provided him with some tools so that he could use to self-diagnose his midterm exam. He then spent hours using those tools, and on the final exam received the second highest grade in the class. That was an epiphany for me. I now follow the old saying: give a person a fish, they eat for a day. But teach them to fish then they eat for a lifetime.

You can significantly improve your writing if you stop expecting line-by-line debriefs of your answers. Instead, become a self-reflective learner. It’s hard at first because most students have never done it. It’s also time consuming, which stops many students because they don’t see the value behind the method. But once you go down this path it will help you become a better writer and thinker. For more information on this method please check out our exam grading page.