My mid-term papers in constitutional law are now graded and returned, so one of the many piles of paper has been moved off my desk. I require my students to write a majority opinion and a dissent in a pending or hypothetical case before the Supreme Court. This year the students wrote opinions in the two race-conscious school assignment cases that will be argued Monday, December 4.
The papers were, by and large, good, and now that I have finished grading them I am pretty confident that assigning such a paper is a good idea, all told. To be sure, grading them is not fun, and I think far more doctrinal teachers would assign mid-terms if we could get teaching assistants to do the grading. Further, it is unpleasant having to face a class comprised of some students who resent the teacher for assessing a lower grade than the student desired.
Nevertheless, I think mid-terms of the sort that I use can be valuable tools for both teaching and assessment, for several reasons. First, requiring both a majority opinion and a dissent forces students to approach the assignment thinking about counter-arguments, and allows me to demonstrate that the most effective legal writing anticipates and deflates those counter-arguments. Second, for a case where the issues are already apparent, it allows the students to focus on the techniques of making the arguments, rather than on discovering the case that’s on all-fours with theirs. (A true research paper would have value as well, and perhaps I will try something like that in a later semester, but there is a benefit even without requiring the students to find the issues themselves.) Third, my paper requires students to pay attention to which individual Justices are signing-on to statements in precedential cases. Until they get to constitutional law, many students are unfamiliar with the importance of not only realizing what “the Court” said, but also who on the Court said it. Fourth, a writing assignment is much closer to real-life legal work than is the sit-down exam. Fifth, the mid-term gives me an additional data point on which to assess the students’ performance, which decreases the crap-shoot nature of law-school grades. Overall, therefore, I think it is a good thing to require these mis-semester writing assignments. But, as I said, I’ve finished grading them.
Posted by Michael Dimino on November 30, 2006 at 01:51 PM
Comments
Whether or not a law professor should assign midterms is always an issue of great contention. Some students really, really hate them, because it prevents them from just waiting until the last moment to learn the material.
I loved them for the same reason. The few courses in which I had midterms gave me a way to collate and compile what I’d learned partway through the course. I am firmly convinced that I earned higher grades and learned more in classes that had midterms than in classes that did not, and that the difference was purely the midterm and the midterm review, not any other factor.
In fact, I’ve always felt that failure to assign midterms is a sign of laziness amongst professors, particular law professors, because assigning a midterm is, in my opinion formed with only anecdotal data such a surefire way to increase the amount of learning in the classroom. It always seemed like educational negligence not to do it. Sure, some students whine, but last I checked, making the students happy wasn’t the point.
So, congratulations and thank you for assigning this midterm. I wish that more of my professors had done so.
Posted by: Patrick | Dec 1, 2006 10:07:26 AM